What Microsoft (and Apple) Should Really Learn from the iPhone

Anyone who calls using Windows a hassle-free experience is either a Microsoft PR hack or needs to get his head examined. Possibly both. The same goes for anyone who calls the iPhone hard to figure out.

To install a program on Windows, you have to know where to find it, where to find the file you’ve downloaded, where to find it once it’s installed, and how to use it once you launch it. Uninstalling that program requires you to know how to get to the Control Panel area that manages applications.

This isn’t hard, but it’s slow, and it has a learning curve. To install an app on an iPhone, you merely browse the App Store and tap the green button if you like what you’ve found. All the apps are on the home screen, so they’re not hard to find. (I can’t wait for Folders in OS 4.0 to let people screw that up, by the way.) More to the point, trying out an application is actually feasible, taking seconds to install instead of minutes.

That means people do more on the iPhone, because there’s no hassle to trying new things. On Windows, it necessarily takes time to go through the tedious install process, installing drivers and resources that Windows never seems to include by default that the program’s executable file requires, and uninstallation often adds to a growing trash pile of forgotten files, rogue registry keys and failed uninstallations that eventually forces the routine “format-and-reinstall” that Windows users go through to keep their systems running relatively smoothly every six months or so.

So, I think they should build not just an App Store, but an entire framework that mirrors the iPhone SDK’s functionality. Applications really should take one click to install. They shouldn’t require additional frameworks like .NET 3.5 or DirectX or some random .DLL’s to be installed along with it. They definitely shouldn’t require a restart of the machine. There should be a way to pay for paid applications with a Live account or PayPal or something similar that can be easily and rarely repeated when needed. They should be easy to find in the store. They should be removable without leaving any trace.

If Microsoft were to release this, I think you will see a lot more people using and consuming applications. Perhaps more developers will get on board, too, because the whole cloud infrastructure to run this would be managed by Microsoft and all they would have to do is sit back and cash the checks.

Finally, is this something that Apple should look into with OS X? I believe so. Yes, Mac applications really can be run within seconds of clicking the download link, most of the time. Finding the application, however, is still up to the user, and uninstalling the application without AppZapper is way too complicated for the average user beyond deleting the application file itself, particularly with Preference Panes and the like. All Apple would really need to do is build an online storefront and include a built-in tool similar to AppZapper. Users can download AppZapper and Bodega and put together themselves what I’m suggesting Apple implement. Microsoft’s built a situation that will involve a lot more work to repair.

I really do believe that the App Store is the way of the future. Not so much the strict censorship, but the user experience, particularly the ease of adding/removing and the centralized browseable collection, is rock solid. I’m hoping to see a desktop implementation someday.