Sinofsky: Technology transitions are 'bumpy'

Former MS Windows president explains that new tech products often don't have all the features of the tools they replace

Former Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky has described technology transitions as "bumpy", explaining that businesses need to get over the fact that new tools are often less feature-rich than those they replace.

Speaking at BoxWorks, Box's annual customer and partner event in San Francisco this week, Sinofsky explained that this issue is one that confronts online document storage and collaboration firm Box, a company for which Sinofsky now has an advisory role.

"Most Box users will come to you and say this [Box's storage and collaboration suite] doesn't have all the features of the thing I currently use so it's off the list. Technology people say 'But everyone's carrying around iPads that don't have all the features of laptops'.

"Technology transitions are bumpy. People at the leading edge don't mind losing some capability. Innovators love new replacement products, which often have inferior feature sets to the products they replace."

He added that for many users, the "instant on" capabilities of tablets are so important that they can overlook the loss of certain other features of desktops and laptops.

"Some people look at [recently released document collaboration tool] Box Notes and they'll say they don't have enough buttons on the toolbar therefore it's inferior. Except no other tool has real-time collaboration."

He went on to explain that his first job was unboxing the original IBM PC at a giant aerospace company, and staff at the firm were resistant to the new machines because they wanted to hold on to their typewriters.

"Most PCs got rejected early on because they were terrible at filling out forms," said Sinofsky. "So for a time people did reports on sheets of paper. Then they realised they could just put the form into a word processor. So it was a bumpy path, and the department that developed the original form got repurposed."

Another example he gave concerned document formatting, saying that most people consider tables, bullet points and similar features to be essential.

"But how many of you use formatting on email when you do it on your phone? Or when you use text messages for business, that really has no formatting at all, so all of the sudden you've given up all these capabilities you thought were indispensable. Suddenly we're using phones so formatting doesn't matter."

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Sinofsky: Technology transitions are 'bumpy'

Former MS Windows president explains that new tech products often don't have all the features of the tools they replace

Sinofsky added that he has often been confronted by business groups claiming to be unable to use a new tool because it isn't a full replacement of what they're used to.

"Like they'll say the file systems are different, or they don't have the medium-sized thumbnail view that's so important to them. So they say 'I can't work. I'm done'. People will resist."

But in Sinofsky's view, technology changes happen despite this resistance.

"We're all living the change right now. Most flew to get here [to BoxWorks]. And there are a lot fewer people travelling with laptops than there used to be, as it's so much easier to use a tablet. Laptops have become the hometops."

Sam Schillace, senior vice president, engineering at Box, sharing the stage with Sinofsky, said that five years ago before tablets were on the market, most people would have been highly resistant if someone had offered them a tablet instead of their laptop.

"If you see something that challenges your world view, you either think the new thing is wrong, or I am wrong," stated Schillace. "It's human to not want to look at something new and assume that you're wrong.

"Young people adopt new things quickly - when word processing on computers was new, students took to it, but professors saw it as a fad so ignored it initially. But you have to look at the actual underlying goal. It's not to not have a typewriter on your desk, it's to get the forms produced more quickly, cheaply, or effectively. That's the only navigational tool you have getting through this transition, that's focusing on the business goals."