
Microsoft is not a web company - IsaacSchlueter
http://www.seldo.com/weblog/2009/01/11/microsoft_is_not_a_web_company
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kleneway
Here's the thing - the really smart people at Microsoft are out there working
on the hard problems, like improving facial recognition for image searches,
writing software that synchs up your work and home laptops to your phone,
making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras
and post them directly to Facebook, etc... www.microsoft.com is probably run
by someone in the marketing department, with the actual
html/css/javascript/Silverlight coding outsourced to either an external web
agency or an in-house team of entry-level devs - it's really not a good
indicator of whether or not MS "gets the web". Good headline for an attention-
grabbing blog post, though.

~~~
Hexstream
But if Microsoft _was_ a (good) web company, wouldn't they dedicate serious
resources to www.microsoft.com?

~~~
lhorie
Not necessarily. The company I work for is considered one of the best web
development in my country and virtually none of our clients come from the
front page. We have much more important things to work on than to spend time
and money on something that is frankly just there for the sake of being there.

What I'm wondering right now is what do people mean when they say "x doesn't
get the web" in the context of companies. There are far more companies out
there with not-so-spectacular e-retail websites than there are Googles and
Facebooks, but they are all part of the web-as-an-economic-vehicle.

I think that the number of cosmetic bugs on a site is merely a measure of
technical competency for whoever coded / qa'ed the site before it went live.
Extrapolating this measurement to all Microsoft operations might be a nice
excuse for Microsoft-bashing(tm), but I've been finding this sort of articles
counter-productive especially when people start talking about such non-
scientific measurements such as "getting the web", instead of focusing on
things like current research and interesting acquisitions done by Microsoft
recently.

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richtaur
Yup, that's why they were looking at buying Yahoo! for a while there. The
thing is, they do everything. And when you do everything, you can't do all of
it well. They have too many eggs in too many baskets (for example, why did
they compete in the mp3 player space with Zune?).

They do some things really well (Xbox Live is amazing, for example) but yeah
they fail hard at the web.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Also, let's not forget, once upon a time, they had a pretty damn nice OS,
compared to their competitors.

And IE6 killed Netscape at least in part because it was better in a lot of
ways.

When I was entering college as a CS major, working for Microsoft seemed like a
pretty awesome career goal. Now, I wouldn't even consider it.

What happened, Microsoft? How have you fallen so far?

~~~
jballanc
One word: Management!

...completely hearsay, but I've been told that the management culture at
Microsoft is positively stifling, and all the best engineers are off working
on niche projects that will probably never ship...

~~~
adharmad
Completely agree. This book <br> [http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Windows-
Fumbled-Future-Micros...](http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Windows-Fumbled-
Future-Microsoft/dp/0743203151) although dated gives some good historical
context on Microsoft Management culture (although it is focused more on
Gates).

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amix
I don't think one should underestimate Microsoft and their ability to enter
new markets. They won the Office market from WordPerfect, they beat Apple in
O/S wars, they slashed Netscape in browser wars, they are currently winning
the console wars with Xbox etc. etc.

Stating that they aren't a web company based on their frontpage is naive. They
are excellent business people with lots of money - - just look what they are
doing to Yahoo.

~~~
mattmaroon
You don't win the the console war (and if you could, Nintendo would be the
victor now) you just win battles.

~~~
patio11
"Winning the war" is such a terrible metaphor for measuring business success.
(Winning the war is, relatedly, a poor metaphor for measuring
military/political success, but that is an aside for an another day.)

Who "won the war" in selling food, McDonalds or Olive Garden? Who "won the
war" in selling clothing, Walmart or Armani? Who "won the war" in
entertainment, World of Warcraft or J.R.R. Tolkien?

(You might say that none of these business compete against each other, which I
would say is accurate as far as it goes, but not distinguishing against the
Microsoft or Nintendo example.)

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mixmax
_You did invent XMLHttpRequest, for which I must give you credit, even though
you didn't actually use it for anything interesting until it was rediscovered
years later_

XMLHttpRequest was first deployed in Outlook Web access in the ancient year of
2000. Years before gmail made it popular. So I would certainly say that
Microsoft used it for something...

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indiejade
What gets me about Microsoft every time is how it has this, like . . .
"universally" ugly font. I can take a look at a screenshot capture and in the
blink of an eye know it was rendered on a MS system.

I think one of Microsoft's biggest foibles has been its poor use of fonts, its
stubbornness in rendering for modernized CSS, its stubbornness in rendering
for modern everything. I stopped caring what web pages look like in IE in
about. . oh, 2005.

Of course, Microsoft "hates" to render proper, modern CSS, so its no surprise
that their web arm is so archaic. Almost all of the design foibles mentioned
in the article could be easily corrected if they were to let IE let CSS do
that thing that it does best.

~~~
unalone
Yeah, their web rendering is an absolute pain. The site I'm working on is
nearly all text, and we've put a lot of focus on making it look beautiful on
every OS, every browser. With Windows we had to give up: the only say to get
gorgeous typography is to either use SIFR or to make the fonts ridiculously
big.

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marketer
I used to work at Microsoft, and their corporate web site it's largely
informational and is maintained by operations guys. I think it's under the HR
division. The development structure isn't the same as msn.com or live.com,
which have dedicated product teams and management that gets held accountable
for mistakes like that.

~~~
nailer
> I think it's under the HR division.

Then Microsoft indeed doesn't get it.

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redorb
I really think the design is ugly, but Its just that (besides the few 1-5px
gaps) ugly design. The page isn't totally horrible.

Hacker: "Oh my god, look at that 1px error" Avg user: "what a soft, easy
looking webpage - did you see those images move on the front page?" :)

~~~
coliveira
I don't know much about web design, but what I know is that a page that is not
polished is perceived like this by users, even if it is just a strange feeling
that they can't explain.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
Exactly. Users don't notice "this thing is 3px offset". Users notice "this
site sucks", and then they leave.

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mojonixon
They gave me an interstitial (not sure that's the right word) about
downloading Silverlight before they let me get to the main page. wtf?

scroll bars in drop down menus? wtf? seldo pointed out a couple things wrong,
but pretty much everything is wrong.

unrelated: I was checking out the skydrive and checked the sys requirements.
They don't even support their own operating systems. "Windows Live programs do
not support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Windows Live Family Safety
does not support 64-bit editions of Windows."

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eyeraw
Well at least they've put a Live Search bar at the top of their page. That
means they 'kind of' get the web. If I was running the company, the first
thing I'd do is turn Microsoft.com into something resembling Google.com - a
nearly blank page with a Live search box (and a link to other products). I
mean, come on, show some commitment to owning the search market (and that's
half the battle since people can't actually see the underlying code)...

~~~
netcan
They are yet to say: "Microsoft is Search"

~~~
jcapote
powerset.com?

------
triptych
Also remember that they can afford to fail 100 times if time 101 is a winner.
That's what they do best. Death of a thousand cuts.

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ia
i just checked their homepage in chrome, and the center image flashed briefly
and disappeared. anyone else getting similar results?

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seiji
"btw: there are only 4 line breaks in the entire page. Uh... okay? I'm sure
you're just very concerned about saving space."

Have you checked the source of google.com? Actually, Google isn't even a good
comparison. Try the source of meebo.com.

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hc
clearly, this post was supposed to be called "Microsoft is not a web design
company."

indeed it is not.

