Ease of Use

I have probably blogged about this before, but "easy to use" has become a meaningless phrase in today's technology world. I ran a test through Google for the literal phrase (with quotes) "ease of use" and it told me that there are about 10,100,000 pages that match that. "user friendly" is even more: 15,000,000 results.

I see that IBM is the first entry in the results for "ease of use". I don't think IBM has ever made a product that is truly easy to use. Intel is right behind them. Intel has easy-to-use products? They make microchips!

We actually do have a product that's easy to use, but unfortunately we can't really say that, because the phrase has lost all meaning.

If you read this blog post, and there are words that actually mean something to you in evaluating software, I'd love to know what they are. Add a comment to this post or send me email. I'm betting against compelling, fast, innovative, and all the other words we use to describe our products.

I'm considering a marketing initiative in which we borrow from another lexicon. How about tasty or oaky or loyal or frictionless or maybe XML-enabled ?