Skype has noticed that there is a discrepancy in quality between the two versions, and has decided to make the two versions more similar to each other. Unfortunately, instead of making the Windows version of Skype better, they’ve decided to fix the discrepancy by making the Mac version of Skype more like the Windows version.
This is the number one reason that I prefer Mac-only products to products that are available on both Windows and Mac.
Invariably, the companies decide that since they have 4x the sales on Windows as on Mac, the correct course of action is to build a product that is identical in almost every way with just a very thin GUI "skin" on the outside that is Mac or Windows specific. I don't know if this is because they think that the Windows sales "validate" the UX design or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?), but the results are invariably awful on the Mac.
Windows users are not interchangeable with Mac users. What "works" for someone who was given their PC by the IT department does not work for someone who deliberately chose to buy a product with a tiny market share.
I wonder if you realize that because the Macs have a "tiny market share" (as you describe it) it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface just for those users. Also, it's a plus for the users coming from the PC market because they don't have to relearn the interface.
I wonder if you realize that because the Macs have a "tiny market share" (as you describe it) it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface just for those users.
Considering that I wrote that companies might think it's cheaper, I'm going to go with yes, I realize that companies might think it's cheaper.
Likewise, it's also cheaper for PC Manufacturers to sell me junk PCs loaded up with BloatWare, yet I buy Macs. Just as it's perfectly reasonable for company A to make a product that user B finds repellant, it's also perfectly reasonable for a company to make a Mac product that sucks, and it's equally reasonable for a Mac user to avoid it at all costs. Neither party is wrong in any sense, any more than WalMart is wrong for not selling full carbon mountain bikes or Ibis Cycles (a specialty manufacturer who lays their frames up by hand in the USA) is wrong for not rebranding a Chinese steel MTB at a $500 price point.
It's a plus for the users coming from the PC market because they don't have to relearn the interface.
This is not as sound an argument as the one we agree on. Replicating the PC experience with your Mac product works if you have all these PC users at the office and one day IT removes their PCs and replaces them with Macs. Or if you have a company with Macs and PCs and IT support costs show up in a report somewhere, but Mac user frustration with a poor interface is "off balance-sheet."
But if someone owns a PC and decides to switch to a Mac, it's because he explicitly doesn't like the PC experience. Replicate the PC experience on his Mac, and you may find that he switches products as well as computers.
The problem with the Mac way is that its all consuming. You completely need to reorient and reshape your world view to get past the uncanny valley of your typical Mac fan. No matter how much you polish your QT / Gtk/ Swing UI it will not pass muster. On the Mac platform native apps seem to dominate - eg textmate vs jedit/emacs/vim, omnigraffle vs visio, parallels vs virtualbox / vmware. Which suggests that if you are a cross platform company you might have to cede the "high end" mac purist to a Mac specific app.
There is also the case of the PC user being forced to use a Mac temporarily, i.e. because it is the only kind of computer available in their friend's house/school/etc. Before I owned any Apple products, I would experience this frequently, and be thankful for the programs that were a thin veneer over a windows program (that I was already familiar with.)
Surprisingly, Apple makes a product for people that want a Windows experience on Apple hardware, it's called Bootcamp. I am not trying to be witty: Things like Bootcamp, Parallels, VMWare, and so on exist so that people who want the Windows experience can have it without forcing companies like Skype to try to make their Windows applications pretend to be Mac applications.
I have Parallels. If you log into the Guest account on my machine and want to run Skype, I'd rather you use Skype for Windows and get exactly what you want than deal with something that is kinda-sorta Skype for Windows, but not enough to delight you as a user.
> it's just easier (cheaper, too) to produce a re-chromed version of your software rather than writing a completely new interface
Is it? Can you cite some sources?
I'd less native UIs to take longer, as more custom widgets and chrome is requires. Not to mention, the result is more likely to "feel wrong" since it's less likely to conform to that platform's conventions.
or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?)
From what I recall, Skype's Windows UI is actually written in Delphi - maybe that has changed now, but I think don't they actually have a unified code base for the user interface.
The protocol is proprietary - and in that case it is in Skype's best interest to maintain a similar look and feel throughout all platforms they support.
This of course doesn't mean that they shouldn't be doing so much more on both systems - I just think in this case the requirement of having a similar application on both systems is necessary.
There's an appropriate saying about history: it doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.
A good cross-platform app isn't just dumbly copied at the whiteboard stage of MVC planning. It needs to have certain similarities, sure, but the key interface elements will integrate with the host operating system.
Since Windows has window-attached menu bars, why don't cross-platform apps on a Mac have the same thing? Don't say because there's a menubar object to attach commands to. I've seen plenty of apps that use nspopupbuttons to create window-attached menus while clearing the global menu. The reason it's not done is that it's egregiously bad taste. Defeating the user's expectation of how the app interacts with the operating system forces the user to break out of typical interaction into some unknown set by the developer. It's almost never a pleasant transition because someone with the ego to say "do it my way or else" generally doesn't care about testing on users.
In this case, Skype's mistake was breaking OS X's window management portion (Expose), along with the fact that mac applications are almost always one window : one task.
I agree that the application shouldn't be a verbatim copy on each system. There are obviously platform specific UI and methods that need to be adhered to. My point is that the general interface should be similar enough to be able to move a user from one platform to another and they would be comfortable enough to use the application with just the minimal knowledge of that host platform.
I'm not sure the second half of your first sentence follows from the first, but that's not all that important. OP said he'd rather use Mac-only apps, to which the response was "I guess you only want to talk to Mac users." You can very easily have (and there plenty of examples of) Mac-only apps that talk a protocol that also has Win/Linux/Android/iPhone/etc-only apps. You don't have to give up OS-specific design to have interoperability.
My second point was more that Skype should improve the application for both platforms.
Certainly interoperability isn't an issue - the point is that it's in their best interest to maintain a common application interface. For example, I work at a company of 50 people and we have all variations of Mac, Windows and Linux machines running. By being able to support one interface internally it makes it a lot easier - as well as when certain users switch from their Windows machines in the office to their Mac's when working from home.
By way of agreeing with you I will say that yes, easier for IT is "better" than easier for the users, and this has nothing to do with PCs and Macs, it has to do with the fact that there is no spot in the company's financials for the time and efficiency lost by products that do what they are supposed to do, but do it poorly.
Whereas, it's easy to measure the amount of time IT spends supporting the product. So if there are two different UIs, it's easy to see that you need two different training sessions for users, but hard to measure how much time the Mac users lose struggling with the UI.
As I said, this is hardly a Mac/PC thing. You often see it in horribly designed internal applications. It's easy to measure the cost of development but hard to measure the productivity lost due to craptacular UX. So in 2011 I still see RFQs from clients asking for search pages where you fill in a complex form indicating which field you want searched and how to search it, instead of implementing a single full-text search across the application.
You are missing my point, and that could very well by my fault in not explaining it properly.
Why should an end user, who could use multiple platforms, need to understand two different layouts for the same program. This has nothing to do with different vendors, but the fact that a company needs to invest serious time in to developing a UI that is intuitive in all platforms they are targeting. The user experience should be well thought out so that it is a great application that takes advantage of the operating system interfaces that they are working with. If that user experience is lacking then someone dropped the ball - which is a burden for end users, IT folks and so forth.
This is the number one reason that I prefer Mac-only products to products that are available on both Windows and Mac.
Invariably, the companies decide that since they have 4x the sales on Windows as on Mac, the correct course of action is to build a product that is identical in almost every way with just a very thin GUI "skin" on the outside that is Mac or Windows specific. I don't know if this is because they think that the Windows sales "validate" the UX design or if it's an attempt to save money by having a single code base (or both?), but the results are invariably awful on the Mac.
Windows users are not interchangeable with Mac users. What "works" for someone who was given their PC by the IT department does not work for someone who deliberately chose to buy a product with a tiny market share.