The logo is O.K. Their homepage http://microsoft.com looks like a mix between a "corporate" website template you'd buy for $50 and a domain squatting page with amazon referral links.
Gosh I want to cheer for microsoft but they make it real hard.
The web came to Microsoft after the IPO. At the time, there were a lot employees with "fuck you money" and the web was still the wild west not a corporate branding commodity. Thus Microsoft's approach has been generally hands off and the first priority has always been to get information out on the web.
The idea of a monolithic website like Apple's or Google's just doesn't apply. It's not part of Microsoft's DNA. Compare:
I understand what mean about it not being part of Microsoft's DNA, but it seems like you're trying to blame Microsoft's poor web presence on its age. How do you then rationalize other pre-Web companies like IBM and Apple who have managed to successfully embrace it?
IBM and Apple each have a more homogeneous audience.
IBM is a consulting company and courts mid- to upper-level manager types with purchasing authority. After few seconds on the page you are invited to speak with a sales consultant via a popup.
Apple is focused exclusively on the (premium) consumer space.
Both companies represent top-down totalitarianism (I say this without value-connotation): IBM suggest corporate command and control, Apple has a well-curated walled garden.
Microsoft's site reminds me of one of the more effective university websites.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of those companies except as a consumer. My iPhone is my favorite toy.
I've said it before, but I feel Microsoft's problem is that they cannot say no to things.
This serves them well in the Enterprise, where every installation requires customisations (and people can afford to pay for the maintenance of those customisations) but spills over into everything they do, meaning they cannot keep things simple.
The dozens of different Windows versions, the fact that their new flagship tablet ships in two versions with incompatible instruction sets, where one will only run "Windows 8 style" applications, and that the operating system itself has two completely different user interfaces that doesn't interoperate well. Actually taking the Kin to product launch instead of killing it off internally and refocusing efforts at a time when Windows Mobile was losing market share.
>Actually taking the Kin to product launch instead of killing it off internally and refocusing efforts at a time when Windows Mobile was losing market share.
The Kin is a case study in everything that's wrong with Microsoft as a company.
In-fighting and turf wars, discarding products they bought up (e.g., Danger) to shoehorn in Microsoft technologies while failing to leverage their own technologies in places where they'd make sense, lack of a cohesive corporate vision, the list goes on.
Ars had a pretty decent post-mortem of the project.
While its probably correct to say that Microsoft does not have a homogenous audience and that that is why their online presence lacks the clarity of, say, Apple. I think the lack of clarity is a bad thing and Microsoft only really have themselves to blame for their audience.
If you're going to go after a very varied audience you should probably think carefully about whether you need to have lots of sub brands (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) so that your customers simply google for the sub brand, or whether you actually can attach some core values onto the parent brand that will be meaningful in all these different markets (e.g. Virgin or Disney). It's no good having a scatter gun product strategy then neglecting your branding and online presence because you sell to everyone everywhere.
Apple sold 18.65M iPhones in Q2 2011, that's iPhone alone, I think calling Apple's audience homogeneous is ridiculous, and falls under the same as "mac is for designers" old-fashion statement.
Is it a poor web presence? You haven't made a case for that, the only thing that's been stated is that the visual style is inconsistent between major areas. Is that a bad thing?
Well... They try to get to a new simplicity. I agree that they fail at making it great, but you´ve got to give them some love for trying.
Metro is actually innovative, yet not ideal for desktop PCs. And it´s just the same with the new Logo: Strict simplicity (which makes Apple great), but not thought through in a way.
To me it feels like there´s a gatekeeper at the top missing asking the tough questions before the product is out of the door. The one that asks: "But does it really make sense and how can we do better" when the managers self-congratulate themselves on the bold moves.
LCIDs in the URI remove ambiguity about which language to serve (do you use Accept-Language? Or IP sniffing? Or user prefs in cookies?), they remove ambiguity about which storefront to show for a market and - most importantly - they make alternate language/markets indexable by search engines because each has a distinct URI.
Why are Apple, IBM, Amazon, Google doing it if it's such a terrible design?
> do you use Accept-Language? Or IP sniffing? Or user prefs in cookies?
How do you think they picked which language to serve me in the first place? ;) What you're saying is true about eliminating ambiguity but parent commenter just linked to microsoft.com.
When I had to do this for a site, the waterfall I settled on was:
1. Did they just manually pick a language/is it in the URL? (serve that language, set cookie)
2. Do they have a cookie? (serve that language)
3. Do we support any of their Accept-Language prefs? (serve that language, set cookie)
4. Serve en-us (fallback)
My points being a) Microsoft.com is using langauge-accept (probably) and b) you can support URL picking & language-accept and not always have an ugly URL.
EDIT: oops, changing my language to ``es``, clearing cookies & revisiting microsoft.com didn't change the language. I guess they are just serving everyone at .com English :p
Accept-Language is clearly the correct solution. It's easy to set in browsers (at least it is in Opera, if it's not in some other browser then I contend that's a UI bug), and OEMs should set it to a sane default for the region in which the browser is distributed.
The indexability is an interesting argument, but my response is that there should be a standard mechanism to query, via HTTP OPTIONS, in which languages a resource is available. By doing so, a user agent or search engine can easily index all versions of a resource.
Whether or not such a standard exists I do not know, but Google certainly has the clout to standardize such a mechanism (viz. sitemaps and #!).
Unfortunately Accept-Language simply doesn't work - if you talk to engineers at Google they'll tell you that they've done the research and an enormous number of browsers have the incorrect setting and hence send an inappropriate header.
What would you propose when, as translations have to be done manually, the available content for different pages is out of sync?
For example, maybe that latest product announcement hasn't been translated to French yet. If I send a product list URL to my french-speaking buddy, should the product disappear from the product list?
I guess it relates to the issue discussed here a day or two ago about redirection ("am I suddenly Japanese" or something like that; should have been "think I'm turning Japanese" ...). The default.aspx could be an affirmation of the backend being used so that when you see that elsewhere you know the server tech is MS, a sort of advertising/brand presence decision.
What I find interesting is that the new logo is not on the en-gb or fr-fr pages in the header bar and they use the old Microsoft trademark typeface. They also use the old Windows logo on, it seems, all but the en-us page. Complete mess in terms of brand presentation.
The default.aspx could be an affirmation of the backend being used so that when you see that elsewhere you know the server tech is MS, a sort of advertising/brand presence decision.
I thought of that too, but that's sort of like Toyota advertising what sort of engine a car has by leaving the muffler off of all the showroom models. Gearheads can tell the engine by the cacophony in the showroom lot, but everyone else will get the impression that Toyota's cars are noisy.
That will happen more as they move from Asp.net webforms to ASP.NET MVC. the aspx extension has become shorthand for "someone still needs to upgrade that"
What is wrong with that url (except default.aspx)? It's widely used and I like if I'm not forced to some region or locale based on my IP and Accept-Language. Well, I still am but I can change it easily if they give me this url (or even better link on a page).
Accept-Language is trivial to change; on Opera, it's one of the three things on the first tab of Preferences, and I can set it for all sites rather than on a per-site basis.
The content is (should be) identical, and the recipient of your link would most likely want to read the content in his/her preferred language.
If you really wanted to point out to them some discrepancy in the content of some particular language, then just tell them "switch your language to Chinese and look at xxx here".
On sites where linking to a particular language version of some resource makes sense (e.g. Wikipedia), by all means, accept a ?lang=de parameter… it's exactly as much mechanism as a directory component, but it doesn't imply any hierarchical structure, and can be dropped to obtain a "canonical" URL.
Microsoft itself provides a prime example for this: Knowledge-Base articles are often poorly translated and you really want to link to the english version if there is no translation available. Implicit content switches are really bad for the user experience.
Also, language versions of big websites often differ hierarchically as well, with the differences in hierarchy being directly bound to the language. On Wikipedia, the problem is so big that it is actually moved to the domain (the highest level of the hierarchy).
(should be): yes. It should be. In the ideal world of people that constructed RFCs. Sadly, there is a real world out there.
In the end, with my users hat on: I don't care. I want to send a link and I assume that my peer sees exactly what I see. I don't want to care about the details of your technical implementation of your website and whether it is structurally sound in the grand scheme of the interwebs. I also don't want to say "and switch to..." every time I send a link.
The layout looks rational enough in the context of the tiled GUI layout they're trying to push.
But the top bar could be a few times thicker. It's too cramped. I tried a quick hack increasing the min-height attribute on hpHdr_PriRow to 50px, which gives much nicer proportions.
I agree. It's fairly in line with the new Metro and Phone 7 UIs. Not as polished though:
* In Chrome, the carousel controls at the top right are cut off. Intentional?
* The "For home" and "For work" buttons on the right shrink the margins between themselves and the carousel on hover but never quite bridge the gap, which looks awkward to my eye.
* The carousel is gigantic and hides all the content below it on all but the largest screen resolutions (and I thought Windows 8 is supposed to be running on small portable tablets?).
* The top menu under the logo is extremely cheesy with its thin 1px border on hover, never mind that it's next to invisible next to that massive carousel. When it comes to actually navigating the site to getting the user to Microsoft's products, this menu is failure.
* …
Generally, the entire layout feels a bit like the team that's been responsible for the page for years has been told to 'clone' the newest UI to the best of their abilities.
It was only this morning that my wife said exactly the same thing about it looking like a domain squatting page (while she was trying to find MSE download on their web site).
At the risk of sounding snarky, not all change is good change.
Of course, it's not like Microsoft EVER had a decent or even remotely stylish logo. The bigger concern I would have over the logo is the website, which is amateurish. Honestly, if I did not know this was Microsoft, I would think it was a startup company that paid $50 for a website template, as you stated, and not a very good one.
i think the worst part about their new homepage is the "Welcome to Microsoft" white bare/space at the top, they could, and should have made better use of that space
Gosh I want to cheer for microsoft but they make it real hard.