S60 Open to new features

Choice is a funny thing. Offering "choice" to customers is a common argument used by companies to justify various kinds of competitive behavior. And "choice" is generally considered a good thing; as Barry Schwartz says, it's the official dogma of western industrial societies that the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.

Schwartz is not against choice as such; he's arguing that choice is not an unalloyed good and can lead to paralysis.

In a similar vein, Håkon Wium Lie (the chief technology officer of Opera) recently wrote in CNet about Microsoft's approach to standards. Talking about an open letter from Microsoft, he notes that The authors argue that consumers want several standards from which to choose and suggests I don't think so. Consumers never wanted the choice between VHS and Beta, and mobile telephony in the United States was hindered by customers having to choose between competing standards.

I think this hints at a key to the paradox, and has a lot to do with where we need to take our browser in the future. People do like choices, but nobody wants to choose about some things. You can choose from a vast array of stereo components, as Schwartz points out, but you want to be able to plug them all together easily. It's good to have a choice of devices that play movies on your television, but incompatible formats like VHS and Betamax (a more current incompatibility is between HD DVD and Blu-ray) don't make anything easier.

Browsers offer some degree of choice. On desktop systems, you can choose tabbed browsing, lots of integrated features, speed, and so on. On handhelds there are choices of layout, navigation, and, again, speed. But I'd bet not a single reader of this blog would opt for the choice of a mobile browser that could only open WML pages.

The best place to build choice into browsers -- and by extension, into the web itself -- is not at any underlying level of interoperability. The browsers you can choose among should all open "web pages", not just some other kind of documents, whether those documents are especially designed for special sorts of devices or not. Because if people choose a browser that just opens some other kind of documents, they're simply going to need TWO browsers, one for "some stuff" and one for "the other stuff". It's too easy to imagine the "two" becoming "three", "four", or more.

We're working hard to make the S60 browser one of the best choices. After all, paralysis only sets in when there are many choices and they're not so different that one stands out. When our browser is clearly the best, we're doing our part to solve the world's problem of "too many choices"!

And yeah, I know, we also need to make our browser something you can more easily "choose" in the sense of just downloading the latest version to your S60. It's just that there are so many things we could choose to do first, it gets so hard to pick one... ;-)

By the way, if you like the Schwartz presentation in the link above, here's a longer presentation he made at Google.