Whether or not Microsoft felt the urge to compete with Google’s Materials design system, it’s more likely that branching out from the flat screen world and committing to pressure sensitivity and/or gesture-based navigation led to this new design system: Microsoft Fluent Design System. Or maybe it’s more: is a design culture taking over the IT/enterprise giant?
While the Fluent Design System was announced along with upcoming system updates and MR controllers at their Build 2017 conference, (not long after Facebook’s F8) it’s important to notice that Microsoft hasn’t taken on Social VR or broadened heavily into content distribution (such as iTunes and Apple TV) beyond the Xbox gaming world. They haven’t come out with Microsoft video studio, and Cortana isn’t being put into an Alexa-style device.
Joe Belfiore at Microsoft Build 2017 with a slide deck that looks and sounds more like it came from an Apple developers’ presentation: “Make our users’ lives better…”
However you might still curse the components of Office 365 or wished your Xbox was as advanced at PlayStation, the solid focus on removing the friction of technology to make it’s power readily available to the least adept, (you might say democratizing technology), seems to be their new cause. In other words, they have taken on Steve Job’s desires for Apple to make products that everyone would use and love, the impetus and North Star that drove the creation of the Macintosh and iPhone, Apple’s signature technological disruptors.
Microsoft seemed to have a me-too attitude about this kind of philosophy: the Surface devices came first as rival tablets, moving next to laptops, then finally large-scale desktop and Hub units. We forget the Kinect was radical, but Microsoft didn’t, and they put the API’s out there to keep it alive and kept thinking about what this kind of interaction with technology could mean. Then they put out the HoloLens, the next signature platform, the only personal Augmented Reality device that’s got developers (and the public) interested. Even more than their Mixed Reality, lower-level approach to AR coming in just a few months, there’s anticipation that something even more desirable/more ready for the general consumer is coming with HoloLens Gen 2.
Which makes the release of the Microsoft Fluent Design System even more important as a sign that 1) Microsoft wants to be a company known for cool innovative, human centered design, not a producer of solid but just functionally competent business tech AND 2) they want the coolness factor that was not part of their brand before to be pervasive, even in their business products – we can talk about what they’re doing with Azure and AI elsewhere. There advertising is changing, they have subdued their being the hardcore anchor of business and IT departments everywhere, and they want to look Millennial-friendly.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at Build 2017
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote may have sounded fresh to an under-40 crowd as he pushed, “empowering everyone on the planet,” and it’s an admirable and noble desire. But I remember that kind of talk from the late Mr. Jobs many years ago. I don’t begrudge his picking up the gauntlet, but I will cringe if he talks about making “insanely great” products for everyone, even if he brings that kind of innovation to market.
We are all winners when we get Windows Creator Updates every six months and a Design System that focuses on the natural interaction across every platform that ordinary people will use intuitively, or with little training. It seems that finally Microsoft is trying to delight the user with every interaction.
I might become a Microsoft Fanboy if they keep this up.
