Recently I visited the home of a friend who I had converted to Firefox a year or two ago. Using his computer to check my email, I was thrust into a parallel universe when I fired up the browser. His Firefox had a really garish black/green look and feel. There were several additional toolbars I hadn’t seen before. I checked his extensions dialog and, sure enough, he had hundreds installed.

This made using Firefox a curiously different experience, like driving a car that’s the same make and model as yours, but which has been radically personalized and “tricked out” with add-ons and gadgets.

This is the beauty of Mozilla products, of course. But in utilizing a fundamentally modular structure, Mozilla may well have defined the future of desktop software.

Take a look at this article. It quotes a senior Cisco security engineer describing the up-coming Windows Vista release:

“Parts of Vista scare me,” said Gleichauf. “Anything with that level of systems complexity will have new threats, as well as bringing new solutions. It’s always a struggle in security trying to build for what you don’t know.”

He has a good point and is stating the software equivalent of the old engineering adage: “The more that moves, the more that can go wrong”. Adding-in new internet-facing services and functions, even if they’re really cool and useful, is just asking for trouble in today’s day and age.

And this is where I think Mozilla has got it right with Firefox, Thunderbird and even Sunbird, the calendar application. They’ve kept it simple. Everything that you need is supplied, but no more. The user-interface is also kept simple. If you want any bells and whistles then you can download them as extensions. If you want a different look then you can download a new theme.

The less there is within the application, the less there is that can go wrong. But, more than this, applications tend to be more appealing when they’re kept simple. In addition, the ability to add-in your own functions to a piece of software (and ignore those you don’t want) is very liberating. We’re talking about a kind of freedom here, where control is passed from the all-powerful developer to the user. We now control the functionality of our software! This is only right because, ultimately, we’re the ones using it!

We’ve seen this before in applications like ICQ, at least in the old days (ie late 90s/early noughties). I very rarely saw anybody use ICQ without having a load of extras installed, but the simplicity and usability of the application “out of the box” was what made it so appealing.

Will Microsoft take heed of this “less is more” attitude? They can’t. If we pay for software, we automatically demand value of money. And value for money means new features. Microsoft have to bloat their applications. They have no choice. It’s a path they started walking down years ago and they can’t turn around. This is the ultimate fallacy of commercial software and it’s what reminds me that, in the (very) long term, commercial software might be little more than an aberration.

I would love to see a time when, say, Microsoft Office is offered in the same way that Mozilla products are. Word would be a simple interface with just a single toolbar and simple menu system. If users wanted additional functionality, such as word counting or, say, revision tracking, they could install it as a plugin.

But that ain’t gonna happen, and this is yet another reason why, ultimately, Microsoft is doomed. Don’t get me wrong—Microsoft will never go away. But it can become irrelevant.

Today’s computer users have moved on and are more savvy than they used to be. We know more about how software works and we understand fundamental concepts such as a plugin structure. We neither need or want bloated software that anticipates our every move and desire.

This is yet another reason why open source and open standards are, ultimately, the future. Only open source has the freedom to innovate to meet the demands of today’s users. Commercial software just can’t follow where we lead.