The Sikh Geek

The main keynote at Remix UK today was delivered by Bill Buxton who is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He started his speech by saying that "Not Everyone was a Designer". He also praised Apple for it’s design and raising the game in the technology sector. Apparently this competition is helping to drive and motivate Microsoft to do better. The whole keynote had been started by the Bill/Jerry Ads and Bill Buxton commented that Bill Gates could be a stand up comedian. I’m not convinced on that one!

Luckily, I found Bill Buxton’s talk more compelling and his focus on "Industrial Design" was interesting. He contended that people didn’t buy the end product of the design but the whole experience from the packaging to the support to the reliability. He highlighted Jonathan Ive, the lead designer at Apple who has apparently been at Apple since 1993, well before Steve Jobs arrived. At that point Apple was on a downward path and Ive had not succeeded in delivering for Apple. When Steve Jobs joined he decided to reinvigorate the company through "Industrial Design" and everyone thought he was crazy and this was no strategy. The rest as they say is history and under this new culture Ive started to deliver. The same people who before were losers suddenly became winners. I guess it says a lot about Steve Jobs and the culture he created. Bill Buxton asked the question "could company culture change?" and answered it by saying that it could in the same way societies cultural norms change over time.

The other interesting points he made was that small consultancies would be the driver of innovation out of the bad economic times were having and pointed to a number of designers who started during the last depression in the 20s and which are still in business. His other contention was that larger companies inevitably always acquire their innovation through acquisition.

I had hoped he was going to tell us how Microsoft was changing its culture but that never came. It’s a question that a lot of people ask and seek to try and find clues to. I’m not sure Microsoft is able to give that "total experience" that you feel with someone like Apple. You could see people at Remix proudly carrying their Macs and showing off their iPhones, whilst people like me opened our laptops secretly and felt very inadequate with our Windows Mobile Smartphones!

I did go on to see some very cool stuff during the day such as Silverlight Media Support, Deepzoom using the Seadragon Technology and Photosynth but how do you get people to have the "total experience" with these.