Microsoft Wins Mobile Design Battle, Loses War

In 2006, Microsoft introduced the Zune, its ill-fated portable music player. But the Zune legacy lived on with a fresh approach on interface design that led to the launch of Metro, the interface now prevalent in everything Microsoft does, from its mobile efforts, to its flagship Windows operating system, to the Xbox, and even to the visual identity of the company.

At its core, this visual identity is based on the Swiss graphic style, which emphasizes typographic elements and clean, sparse graphic treatments, with an emphasis on reading. Their guidelines explain that the focus should not be on the interface (also known as the Chrome) but on the content or experience. But when they originally announced they would take this approach, some of the biggest supporters of the iPhone approach scoffed. John Gruber, at daring fireball, said:

Just about any new UI would be better than the existing Windows Mobile UI. But basing the new Windows Phone 7 UI on the Zune raises the question of why they think it’s going to fare any better than, well, the Zune.

Mike Elgan, in Computer World, saw the UI as dated:

So comparing the Zune UI to the iPod Touch UI isn't like comparing AM radio to FM radio. It's like comparing radio to television.

But somewhere along the way, something major happened. Microsoft's view of a flater color palate, along with a higher emphasis on typography and a move away from showcasing one's interface started gaining followers. The Metro UI, once reviled, started appearing more appealing to some people. In 2013, flat design, originally considered an over-simplification when Microsoft pursued it with its devices, started trending up, as renewed interest in typography and new approaches to presenting information on mobile devices had developers revisiting some older ideas.

And then, all of a sudden, Microsoft's ideas on design were everywhere: Google , in its new products, started to adopt the spare typographic-centric approach, more recently with Google Now (The redesign of Gmail on tablets and mobile devices followed the same route and eventually); Other companies started removing interface elements and increasing whitespace, with an increased emphasis on the content; Color palettes went more neutral.

And pretty quickly, the outlandish ideas that Microsoft had pushed forward were not so outlandish anymore. When Android Jelly Bean was introduced in spring 2012, the UI went flatter, and Google's guidelines for the OS' iconography asked developers to develop a visual language that was "Neutral, flat, and simple." When Blackberry released its new OS, its design was flat and heavy on typographic queues.

But there was one lone hold-out.

As one of the thought leaders in the mobile space, Apple could afford to do anything it wanted. Its legions of fans would generally follow the company in whatever direction it takes them, buying incremental guys as radical reinvention. But this week, at the WWDC, Apple showed a facet of itself that had not been seen in a long time: that of a company refining its offerings to match what the competition already had on the market.

And then, there was the interface, leading blogger Om Malik to quip on Twitter:

Somewhere in Microsoft they are watching the ios7 and wondering to themselves - wtf. We got this thing right first!

— Om Malik (@om) June 10, 2013

With that move, Apple conceded the user interface leader title to Microsoft, and its supporters saw Microsoft's offering, now repackaged as Apple's, as a better place for mobile operating systems. John Gruber, earlier this week, put it as follows:

 iOS 7 is not perfect; this new design framework will evolve and improve over time, just like iOS’s original aesthetic did. But it’s a conceptual foundation that corrects all of the excesses of the original iOS aesthetic. It’s radically different but not disorienting. Less flashy, less bling, more subtle, more refined.

One would assume that such adulation over Microsoft's approach to mobile interface design would have people in Redmond popping up champagne bottles. But unfortunately, winning this battle may ultimately be the root of the company's demise in the mobile space.

To date, the company had banked very heavily on its interface as its key differentiator in the market. While the company was behind in terms of number of applications supported on its devices, or number of devices put in the hands of customers, it could make the case that users would eventually make their way to the new operating system because of its radically different look and feel. As someone who carried a Windows device with me for a few months, I can say that there is much to be admired in some of the choices Microsoft made with this interface.

But as competitors are adopting some of its innovations there, Microsoft is in a bind: it doesn't have the kind of support from the development community needed to math either Android or iOS on app development, its hold on the corporate environment has been slowly eroding as companies shift to BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) policies, it has not been able to produce or get a partner to produce a hit phone that will tweak the needle in terms of adoption (meanwhile, the Android alliance, through both Samsung and HTC , has started to produce hardware that comes close to or exceeds what Apple offers), and now the user experience it pioneered is adopted by all.

So the question now is: where does Microsoft want to go today? Is its success predicated on trying to break into markets where adoption of smartphones has not yet reached the saturation levels we're seeing in more developed market? Is it another radical rethinking of the value proposition of mobile devices? Or is it the creation of its own mobile phone (their first foray in the tablet market with the Surface seems to be slowly fading away as a failure) ? These are tough times for the tech giant and it seems that the company needs to do something major if it wants to have any chance for relevance in the mobile space. The company that was once synonymous with computing may find itself locked out of one key segment of the market and new user interaction models may not be enough to bring it back to life.