The news that Microsoft is delaying (until 2007) Vista, the next consumer version of Windows, isn’t much of a surprise. Well, maybe it is surprising considering that just last week Steve Ballmer said Vista would come out before the end of the year, according to ZDNet (found after reading a tip by Paul Kedrosky).

Compare this to MySpace. Kathy Sierra, a blogger at Creating Passionate Users, recently asked her daughter (”an extremely passionate MySpace user”) why the site was so addictive. Key quotes:

“myspace keeps doing what everybody really wants, and it happens instantly.”

She said they respond to feedback, “As soon as you think of something, it’s in there.”

She said, “It’s always evolving. It changes constantly. There’s always something new.”

I asked if these changes were disruptive or made it harder to use when nothing stays the same, and she gave me that teenage-attitude-eye-rolling-what-a-lame-question look.

Then she said the weirdest thing of all: “myspace is like a whole new plane of existence.”
She wasn’t kidding.

For better or worse, this is our current reality: we have been conditioned to expect speed.

There are examples of this everywhere. Google, for example, shows us after each search just how long we had to wait.

Instant messenger is just that. Yahoo News shows an AP feed with time stamps, so we know how old each story is.

All this in mind, an incredibly important (and difficult) challenge facing software companies today is what features and functions to eliminate rather than build. What won’t you do today?

If you’re interested in this topic, I suggest reading 37signal’s blog, Signal vs Noise.

Posted by Dan Grossman on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 11:59 am.