Continuing the theme of software companies needing to become more customer-centric, it seems to me that greater care and thought needs to be given to the process of installation and configuration of software.
In part this thought was stimulated by the glimpse of the configuration tool in the Whitehorse demo I mentioned recently, Whitehorse - Graphical Design in Visual Studio Whidbey .
That idea of ... I am struggling for the right term here ... an automatic way to identify configuration problems and suggest or provide (it isn't clear from the demo just how far the Whitehorse configuration functionality goes) a way to fix the misconfigurations seems to me to be something that Microsoft ought to be aiming to make routine for all their more complex products.
At the moment the real life situation is that Microsoft is far from achieving that. One example that went through my hands recently was the install for BizTalk Server 2004. The installation instructions were lengthy and complex. In itself that isn't surprising for a product as complex as BizTalk Server 2004.
But it was made more complex for me as a customer than it need have been!
As a customer I don't need or want to know what the installation issues are for an operating system that I am not using. If I am installing on Windows Server 2003 then information about Windows Server 2000, for example, just gets in the way. To present installation information in a developer-centric way seems to me to be inappropriate and inefficient. At least it's inefficient for the customer.
To add to the complexity of the BizTalk Server 2004 install, a raft of prerequisites and hotfixes are required. But none of them was included on the installation CD.
So, if I had been a "real" customer who had spent several thousand dollars for a production licence is it unreasonable to expect that all the pieces would actually be on the CD? Imagine buying a Ferrari and then finding after you take it home that you need to go to one garage to get the spare tyre, to another garage to get the spare set of car keys, to yet another garage to get the key that locks the petrol filler cap. And so on.
If it is ridiculous to have to do that for a car ... and it is ... why is it that those who produce software installation information can't see the totally avoidable problems they cause customers?
If, instead of incomplete installation components and a document which mixed information for multiple operating systems, there had been a Whitehorse-like configuration detection and assistance tool, an install that took several hours could have been very much smoother, quicker and more efficient.
Those who produce installation software need to become more customer-centric.
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 27, 2004 09:22 AM