Who ordered the scrambled brains?

It warmed my heart this week to see that innovation is trumping market dominance in three important areas in technology. First, we have news that the Firefox user base has doubled since April 2005 to nearly 13% globally, 15% nationally. That’s tremendous considering it has to overcome the convenience of pre-installed browsers on both Windows and Mac OS X. Firefox is simply more powerful and secure than Internet Explorer, while also maintaining or improving usability. These traits are usually inversely proportional. As a developer, I also like Firefox because it promotes standards-compliant web development by respecting open standards, which frees the people from vendor lock-in.

Second, we have an upsurge in the user base of Apple laptops, doubling to 12% of the market from January. I can personally attest to the merits of Apple laptops: extremely intuitive without sacrificing versatility or performance. They are also the only laptops to run Mac OS X, which shares the same traits as the hardware (and also has a predictable update cycle, unlike the 4 years late and counting upgrade to Windows XP). Of course, these numbers are most certainly also aided by the new Intel-based Apple laptops, which can also run Windows XP. That is the holy grail of consumer computing if ever such a thing existed, and like Firefox, frees people from Apple’s hardware lock-in. (And I cannot wait to get one… Visual Studio on Apple hardware—it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye.)

Third, there was a post on the blog of influential tech publisher Tim O’Reilly last week musing about the migration from Mac OS X to Ubuntu GNU/Linux by technophilic dweeb-nerds (i.e. FOSS maniacs). Since few of you fit that description, you probably don’t know that Ubuntu is the latest and greatest operating system in the Linux and open source community. What is so great about it is its unrelenting focus on usability. It certainly rivals Mac OS X in usability, and offers a much more powerful development environment for hardcore programming dorks like myself. (Though Apple’s offerings have been getting sweeter year after year.)

What this shows me is that people are starting to be both more discerning over the usability of their computing tools and also more sensitive to restrictive product lock-in, finally! Whether that means they are actively pursuing other products or they are merely putting more trust in the advice of their tech-savvy friends, it’s clear that standards of usability and freedom are rising. The freedom factor may be prescient of a backlash against digital media DRM, especially as people become more educated about technology and injustice in media publishing. This may be a part of a larger trend that includes movement away from lock-in by traditional media purveyors, with the rise of user-generated content.) Clunky-junky browsers, utilitarian hardware, and operating systems are being trashed for products that focus on the golden coin of simplicity: usability on one side, aesthetics on the other. If you’ve ever talked shop with me, you know that improving usability is my raison d’etre. So I like this trend, and I see it reflected elsewhere, most notably in automobile (e.g. Audi/VW, Volvo) and furniture (e.g. IKEA) design.

Side note: “Visual Studio on Apple hardware”? Yes, I admit it, I am enamored by Microsoft’s software development tools. While they crapped up many of their other products and their public image in the last five years, they have certainly not slacked in their development technology. And I feel there is a groundswell of usability and interoperability taking place in Microsoft, which may yet make them an innovative (for once) force to be reckoned with. What pleases me even more is their apparent growing respect for open standards and interoperability. This represents an about-face for them, or probably just a quarter-turn at the moment, but if they continue to deliver on this strategy, I could easily see myself giving much more respect to Microsoft. Interoperability, after all, is the moral currency of software vendors.

Follow me on Twitter for the latest updates, and make sure to check out my community opinion social networking project, Blocvox.