Microsoft vs. DOJ: Why the case is ultimately about usability For all the high-powered lawyers and legal strategists employed in their massive anti-trust defense, Microsoft missed the greatest opportunity to show convincingly that what they were up to was truly good for the customer. The fact is that tight integration of the browser and the operating system is an overwhelming benefit to the world of PC users. In an interesting twist the MS legal team completely missed the ball by not employing proven and convincing professional usability engineering metrics to show meaningful consumer benefits. As is well known in the software development community, Microsoft is an "engineering driven" concern. At no point over the past 10 years has anyone seriously considered MS a paragon of "human-centered" software innovation. In fact, one could say that engineering innovation and marketing drive are the central development themes of the MS culture. These two perspectives have made it possible for MS to advance their operating system to near world domination status. However, this success came as the result of two factors: 1) their operating system is more reliable than other PC platforms (this is not exactly fast company) and 2) MS continually integrated and linked applications into tighter and tighter bundles which had common features and functions. By focusing on these 2 strategies, MS hit on the two most important issues for customer brand building: reliability and perceived value. If one were to ignore the myriad of frustrating interaction problems with MS products, (as a usability professional I am not inclined to do), it is clear that MS has provided the consuming public a tremendous benefit. By integrating and stabilizing the functions and features across several applications, MS has reduced the learning demands and negative transfer effects for tens of millions of PC users. The interesting point about this is that MS has a long and proven track record of reducing customer complexity by integrating applications. This fact could have been very convincingly presented in court by executing a relatively simple GOMS analysis of the MS product line. (GOMS is a well-developed usability metric commonly employed in user interface design and analysis.) A historical presentation using professional usability metrics would show that MS has offered an amazing benefit to the consuming public by creating common interaction modes across different applications. Furthermore, a "transfer effects" analysis would have dramatically expanded the obvious. This analysis documents the effects of having to unlearn and relearn features and functions from different software interfaces. Clearly MS products are, on a point-by-point interaction scale, "poor-moderate" in terms of usability, but at work in the DOJ case were the "global" customer issues. By "global" measures, MS has been integrating applications for the benefit of the customer for a long time. Integration of the browser functionality is a means of further simplifying the customer experience for millions of users. When such benefits are properly analyzed and documented, they present a staggering picture of the true impact that software design has on the consuming public's time and effort. In the end, MS came unglued by not employing professional usability methods and metrics to present their case. Anyone who is in software development knows that the name of the game is functional integration. Do not think for a moment that Netscape was blind to functional integration. Certainly Netscape was trying to develop business applications inside their browser functionality, but doing so with HTML is nearly impossible. The interesting point about the MS vs DOJ case is that MS was a victim of its own cultural development bias. Specifically, as an "engineering driven" development culture, MS focused on the engineering aspects of the integration question. They missed the real issues by ignoring the real customer impact of their products over time. Such a perspective would have shown that MS products benefit the customer in ways that are not immediately obvious to lawyers, engineering experts, or, most importantly, Judge Jackson. By invoking engineering rational in their defense MS faced an almost certain defeat at the hands of opposing engineering experts. No matter how clever your engineering solution, there is always another engineering expert who can undo your argument. However, when arguments are put in the context of direct customer benefits, based on sound and proven metrics, the case becomes far more difficult to refute. In the end, MS vs DOJ is not an engineering question, it is a usability question. Defending the wrong issues in such cases is not unusual. As an expert witness in several large federal cases on design, functionality, and trade dress, it is my experience that the clients often attempt to drive the legal strategy. When corporate culture that determines the legal approach, the defense is often unsuccessful. Charles L. Mauro July 25, 2001 Email the editor with any questions or comments.