Dan Fost wrote in The Tech Chronicles about SAP's Hasso Plattner's session at Software 2007 the other day. Plattner was asked about whether ERP software makers ought to look at e.g. Apple for ideas on the appearance of their software. Hasso had this to say:
Beautification is the wrong way. Google is the right way. I am a fan of this company. With all respect to the arts, the arts are not helping.
Be that as it may, I do hope at some point in the future SAP or a development partner or I myself if no one else wants to do it is going to develop a beautiful, artful, sexy way of scrolling through the employees in my cost center (among other things one could think of doing beautifully). I've made a clip of an MS SQL 2005 web ad I happened upon a while ago, and linked to it here. It's not as sharp as I'd prefer, and I should not consider becoming a hand-model - or a mouse-model, rather - but it makes the point. Here's a visual, almost tactile way of scrolling through customer or, employee, data. This is beautification to some extent, artful semi-minimalism, and I have a feeling SAP HCM customers would love it.
Derned if this is going to be done in a browser. But if it is built one day soon and on a browser-platform, I'll buy Hasso dinner. I'll make him dinner.
I am a fan of both Hasso and Apple - but here I must side with Apple. (if only to justify my having bought 4 Apple devices in the last 15 months...although Hasso has indirectly been paying my salary for 15 years)
Hasso may still be remembering the rather unsuccessful “prettification” of the old SAP GUI back in 1999 to the current "MySap" look. This was a skin-deep exercise and never achieved much.
I think Hasso’s analogy is off-base. Apple is not beautiful for the sake of being beautiful, it turns out that it looks good (or can) because it supports elegant solutions and processes.
Windows in fact has many more great-looking “skins” than Mac and yet never looks as clean. Conversely, it is hard either to improve or degrade the Mac look and feel.
Apple has managed to streamline its processes to what is Needed rather than what is Possible. Minimalism is about focusing on Outcomes rather than eliminating Features.
This all smacks of good “use-case”-based development…which is exactly Google’s approach too. Of course all of this was pioneered by Mother Nature first: natural selection + random mutation + 5 billion years = the ultimate UAT workbench … (I am also a Karl Popper fan)
So it is all about purpose. Google is clear about its purpose, much clearer than SAP right now. SAP should look at Apple’s ethos rather than design. The look and feel will take care of itself.
Posted by: Jerome Gouvernel | May 18, 2007 at 01:07 PM