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People hate change, and Microsoft’s new Windows 8 computer operating system is being met with confusion and frustration. A recent poll showed that just 35 percent of Americans believe the radically overhauled OS will be an improvement over Windows 7. Indeed, qualitative stories have consumers completely confused about what to do with the strange new tiles. “Where’s the Start button,” they ask.
It’s surprising to see Microsoft essentially porting its mobile operating system onto desktops. Apple’s computer OS has not changed its core icon-and-window look and feel in decades. The iPhone experience looks and feels essentially the same as it did five years and seven model releases ago.
Even “radically redesigned” automobiles are mostly identical to the previous model. You won’t see Land Rover making roadsters, just as you won’t see Stephen King writing presidential biographies.
That’s because customers demand experience consistency. And your hard-won evangelist customers are with you because they trust you. You’ve become second nature to them. Microsoft is asking its hundreds of millions of customers to invest time, energy, and stress — all to basically continue using a computer for the same results as before. And most people will rightfully decide it’s not worth the investment.
When the time for a new PC comes, and people will know they have to learn a new operating system no matter which computer they choose, guess which company they’ll seriously consider for the first time. Microsoft is voluntarily giving up the goodwill it has built with customers here.
Consistency is the key: Create new products and services. Improve your existing ones. Offer new options. But keep the core experience consistent. Customers stay with you for a reason: They rely on you. They trust you. They know what to expect from you.
Don’t take that away from them.
I’m being asked to appear at events as a speaker quite frequently recently. My talks are packed with high-value, immediately applicable best practices. They’re highly interactive, totally customized to your audience, and I never use PowerPoint, which bores me. I’ve had a special, dedicated area on my Web site created for my speeches, and it’s filled with videos: Here’s the overview, my speech topics, and a sample video clip.
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The Windows 8 situation is also a great example of a company not quite recognising its value proposition to consumers. From Microsoft’s point of view, the new software is “better” (could mean all kinds of things, from “leaner code” to “uses up more of your hard drive so you’ll need to buy a new PC”!). From the consumer’s point of view, they’ve moved away from part of the value proposition which is that Windows is intuitive and easy to use. If MS were clear on their value proposition to start with, the “where’s the Start button” cry which is probably leaving customers and product designers in despair, wouldn’t have happened – do you agree?
There is nothing wrong with wanting to grow and evolve your company, but you make a great point–you can’t leave your customers behind along the way. Customers expect certain things from you and if your new direction doesn’t live up to those expectations you risk losing what should have been a fail-safe customer.