While putting in a dozen miles on the stationary bike, I was reading my blogs on my LG CU500, and found Robert Scoble’s post on the startup sound in Microsoft Vista. Apparently the plan for Vista is to have a mandatory, unchanging startup sound to greet you whenever you power on your computer.

All I can say is “WTF?” What is the rationale for dictating something to your users like this?

Scoble lists two reasons:

A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react. You can turn on your Vista machine, go eat some cereal, while your machine is cold booting and then this gentle sound will come out telling you that you can log in. You won’t need to wait for your machine to startup, he says.

I have a different idea: how about working toward creating a system which you don’t need to wait for because it actually starts immediately when you power it on? You won’t need the short, brief, postive confirmation, you’ll just turn on your computer and start using it. That would be a positive branding experience.

Volume control in a Windows machine is a wild west. A mess. The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine. Let’s say you muted your machine, and you don’t hear your startup sound, you know you aren’t ready to listen to stuff. The Xbox has a hard-wired startup sound. There is one way to mute it: to turn down the speakers that are connected to your Xbox. Same will be true for Windows Vista.

So, let me get this straight. You think that volume control is a mess, so your solution is to make it mandatory that someone experience a sound which is almost certainly set to the wrong level every single time they start their computer?.

I frequently use laptops in libraries or other public areas where all the beeps, startups and audio confirmations can be disturbing to the people around me. I use my laptop in my living room while watching TV with my wife (who often is typing on her own laptop). Mandatory sounds in that arena are also annoying.

But here’s the real thing: Scoble says “I can see this from both sides.” Well, that’s good, then the answer is really quite obvious:

You set the default startup sound to be something. You allow the user to change or disable it.

Honestly, is there even one user anywhere who asked you to choose a startup sound for them and hardwire it so you couldn’t turn it off? I understand how your market research guys might want you to do that, in some vain hope of creating “positive user experience”, but I’d hope that you’d do that by making a fast, robust, useful and even fun product. DIctating something even as trivial as this to your users simply to serve as advertising for yourself is just silly.

[tags]Microsoft,Rants and Raves[/tags]