Apple began, not as the giant company it is today, but as a small workshop in the Jobses’ garage in Palo Altos. Steve Jobs’ drive for perfection might be one of the most defining factors in the products he ever made that set them aside, but it was also sure to his uncanny ability to know exactly what the customer wanted. While his company was the first one to bring Graphical User Interfaces to the masses, Microsoft son followed suit with it’s DOS. It subsequently upgraded to various versions of Windows, each with their unique interface.
Steve Jobs later introduced the product that would revolutionize mobile computing, again with his drive for perfection firmly in place. While this perfection is the product of one of the most simple and intuitive user interfaces ever seen on handheld devices, Windows’ Bill Gates had risen to the challenge and brought about the most simple and intuitive of user interfaces for the mobile device, maybe moreso than the iPhone. While the IPhone’s have pretty much the same GUI, Windows Phone 7 had introduced a new concept called Metro GUI, that has big colourful tiles with a simple icon in them indicating the application it launches. Swiping left across these tiles gives access to the Microsoft Office application that Microsoft had developed for it’s mobile OS.
After using the GUI for a few months now, I can hardly wait for the release of Windows 8, which again boasts of this great UI on a desktop computer.
OS X Lion was one of the last pieces of Jobs’ perfectionism. With one of the greatest designers put of the way at Apple, we can only hope that Tim Cook is as much a perfectionist as Jobs was and come up with a better GUI than it’s rival Windows.
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