We had our third Monday meeting last week. We talked about usability. Later on lunch my friend talked about how Lego dropped RnD costs by taking advantage of the users own enthusiasm. Instead of selling their own designs they moved into supplying the blocks for the designs of the Lego-fans.

In the usability lecture we talked about good and bad products and listed products with good and bad design. Apple and Microsoft both came up in the discussion as prime examples. Apple has previously beat Microsoft in usability, but it has also been very controlling on it’s products.

There has been a lot of commotion concerning Apple’s Iphone. Users have complained about having very little freedom (even in terms of choosing a network carrier – “AT&T or DIE”). I have never been into all the hype about Apple, even though those mp3-players are great. I don’t like to pay extra 100€ just for an easier and prettier UI, when some other features are downgraded (that goes for apple laptops as well). If some company would combine the sleek UI with all the nerdy extra features, I’d be happy to cough up an extra 200€ easy. If I just could eat my cake and keep it too *sigh*.

p.s. There was an interesting study in the EU on open source.

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf