Privy

Recently, there was a debate held in my company about when to choose best design and when to go for an optimal design. The debate, according to me was a success, as people brought out great points for either option. One person supporting optimal design gave the classic example of the American pressure sensing pen vs Russian Pencil.

Now, I am a very opinionated person and unfortunately, I was only a part of the audience. I tried desparately to get the microphone during the audience round, to no avail. But, my blog is the best place for me to speak out my mind infront of anybody who cares to listen (read actually). Let me take one more example and then I will throw my opinion in this regard.

Somebody said iPhone has the best design and iPhone is a success. Now, this made me wonder, it is really true? Or, are people confusing the external appearance of the phone to its design? Now, one very important feature missing in iPhone is the very simple “cut”, “copy” and “paste” feature. It was missing so you would think, maybe they forgot. The original iPhone did not have it, neither does iPhone 3G.

If iPhone really were a great design, it would have been very easy to extend it, to add features like the above. However, it turns out that the current design would require a major change to implement the above feature. So, iPhone is not a best design, but today it is definitely the best product.

So, my valuable opinion goes… There is no such thing as Optimal design, but only an optimal solution. It is either a Good design, Better design, Best design or bad design for that matter. One may never choose a bad design, but it might turn out to be one. We generally aim for an optimal solution and depending upon its comparative degree, we choose either a good design, better design or best design.

It might turn out that Google’s Android has a better design than an iPhone. But under the current circumstances iPhone has a more than an optimal solution. This might change, however, in the future. Both Google and Apple are great companies.

T-mobile G1

The highly anticipated Googe phone G1 has been finally released to much anticipation. The phone had an advantage or disadvantage of being pitted against the iphone. It’s success or failure is bound to be measured in terms of how well it can compete against the holy grail of phones.

This comparision is however a little unfair to G1. One thing is for sure, Google wanted to play it safe and wanted to test for itself the potential of the platform in the most usable way. So beautification was never their primary motive. But the capability realisation was indeed so.

The inclusion of a physical keyboard with exclusion of a soft keyboard summarizes it very well. The primary aim for google is to increase the penetration of its services in the mobile segment. When you use Google search, you need to “type”. Unless Google brings out some kind of a visual search, this is not going to change in the near future. Or the kind of gesture typing is perfected. Hence, the importance of keyboard.

The phone has been thus far well received for a variety of reasons, though not a run away success like the iphone. But, it has definitely changed the battlefield. iPhone made people realize the potential of smart phones. GPhone made people realize the potential of open source. Both are game changers in their own right.

For those who use Firefox and GMail, it might be a now very common thing to find an error message “This is taking longer than usual. Try reloading the page.” Amazingly, I haven’t seen this same error in Chrome. Google released some javascript tests which showed Chrome to be 10x faster than Firefox and IE, which Firefox rubbished by releasing its own tests.

But, what is the main point here that I am trying to intend? Where Chrome is faster or not, Google knows how to make it look so. Google is now developing a lot of heavy javascript centric webapps. Either it is optimizing them to be used with Chrome or they are making optimal usage of Chrome. Either way, they are forming a dependence on Chrome. Chrome might comply with all the standards, but it has optimized implementations only in areas which Google likes (as seen from Google tests) and may be not so optimized in other areas (as seen from Firefox tests).

So, as a user am I forced to use Chrome whenever I use any Google app? Is Google going the Microsoft (Internet Explorer) way? What could be the impact now that Android is poised to dominate embedded devices? It might be that some of the fears that I display here are exaggerated, because Chrome (or chromium project) is afterall open source. So other browsers may learn a trick or two. But, will Google’s preferred areas inhibit development in other areas.

I am personally an ardent Google fan and like the way they present their (even ugly looking) applications, just for their simplicity. Google has been a game changer in many fields. Their advertising revenue model enables them to earn even from their competitors. Eg. Most Orkut competitors serve Ads by Google. Google’s strategy in such cases has been to challenge competition but never to kill it. Why kill when they could pay?