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JANUARY 18, 2002 SPECIAL REPORT: THE FUTURE OF APPLE Can Jobs "Think Outside the Pretty Box"? Interface guru Jef Raskin, who helped design the first Mac, says Apple has to get beyond its "form fetish" The fact that point-and-click is still the state-of-the-art isn't a good thing, argues Raskin, who parted with Apple in 1982 and went on to become an interface and computer-design consultant as well as the author of The Humane Interface, ($24.95, Addison-Wesley). Raskin believes that Apple and Steve Jobs should spend more time thinking out of the box about interface design -- and less time thinking about how to build a pretty box. BusinessWeek Online Technology Editor Alex Salkever spoke to him about that and other Apple matters on Jan. 14. Following are edited excerpts from that conversation: Q: How did you become involved in Apple? A: I was their 31st employee. And at the time, I didn't think the Apple II had sufficient legs. The world was changing. So I proposed a project that I called Macintosh that turned things on their head. Instead of starting out with hardware and software as the first design step, I said what we are going to need if we want to reach millions of people is to start with the question of what do people do with a computer, and how do they do it. What is the interface like? And then design the hardware and software to support that. This is why the Macintosh was unlike any commercial product that came before it. Q: Apple lost market share in almost a straight line for much of the 1990s. What do you think went wrong? A: A number of things. One that everyone has talked about is its failure to license the operating system [the software that governs a computer's basic operations]. Another mistake was not moving forward -- and thus losing innovation. Certainly, Macs, along with everything else, have gotten more powerful. But take the new iMac. It's a continuation of Apple's form fetish. What Steve Jobs did was decree that the Apple II was to have an aesthetic enclosure. He said we have to put this in a pretty box. We can't sell a naked board. He was absolutely right. But what he has been doing ever since is repeat that formula. They keep the hardware up to or slightly above the standard set by PCs, but they can't think outside the pretty box. Q: What's wrong with that strategy over the long haul? A: When you sit down at the product and you start typing, you aren't looking at the box. You're looking at the screen. Computers are pretty much fungible at that level. If I sit at a PC or a Mac and use a familiar application, I can pretty much forget which computer I'm using. It all looks and feels the same. Q: So in your opinion, the differential between a Mac and Windows XP isn't huge? A: There certainly is a difference, and the Mac is much easier to use, especially if you're setting up a system or installing programs. But when you're using the computer, then you've got a screen, a keyboard, and a mouse on either system. Who cares about the difference? Q: What do you think Apple should do to differentiate itself? A: It should reevaluate how computers are used. There has been a lot of research in usability over the past couple of decades. Almost none of it has gone into the Apple. My book lays out a series of things that could make computers a lot more pleasant, a heck of a lot easier to use, and possibly a lot more productive. And if Apple thought about these things, I think they could possibly regain market share. Even [Apple's new] OS X [operating system], which has some nice advances, doesn't change anything but cosmetics as far as the user is concerned. You can shift from OS 9 to OS X, and you hardly know that anything has changed. The little square boxes become round baubles. This is window dressing. Q: If you were going to build a next-generation computer for Apple, what would its features be? A: The changes would come in the software. When you want to write a memo, how much work do you get done on the desktop when you're fiddling to open a word processor? Nothing. One of the good things about the kinds of interfaces I am working on is that they don't have a desktop. They don't have an operating system, at least not one that the user sees. You work directly on what you want to work on. If you start typing, it says: "Oh, this person is typing, I had better save what this person is typing." You shouldn't have to switch from application to application. If I'm in the middle of a document and I want to make a calculation, I have to open up this stupid calculator window. Then I have to cut and paste the results into the document. Why can't I just type 59 times 54.6 wherever I happen to be -- in PhotoShop, the word processor, or wherever -- and tell the machine to give me the answer, please, right now? Q: Is there anything Apple could do as an interim step to make OS X more usable? A: Instead of clicking on a setting for whether you want to do a file search or a content search, and then clicking the search button, you should simply put in your search term and choose between clicking on a content search button and a file search button. That would save a whole step. In fact, that's one of the most common mistakes people make. If they want to do a content search, they'll type in a pattern and click "search," and the computer will do a file search because they haven't changed the mode. That's an easy thing to fix. There are hundreds of little stupidities like that in OS X and OS 9. There are even more in XP. Bottom line, we really haven't made significant progress interface-wise from the original Mac. In some ways things have retrogressed. We can do a lot more with the machines, but we haven't made an interface to keep up with the Internet world. We have learned a lot in the worlds of interface and cognitive psychology, but that isn't being taken advantage of. It's as if in the car business they suddenly forgot that radial tires and power steering exist.  Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | JANUARY |
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