Microsoft is not a web company | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is not a web company

seldo.com

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.

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

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.

Isn't the fact that a company treats theirname.com as outsourceable a great indicator that they don't get the web?

I didn't see any microsoft software that actually "making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras and post them directly to Facebook".

But, the new ilife 09 has exactly this feature. IMO, microsoft has to find a way to make its "advanced" technology useful to people.

Definitely agree, just had a long conversation with a coworker about MS's need to apply research to real-life products. FYI, here's the "post to Facebook" feature, it's still in beta and was done by an intern this past summer. I believe eventually the photo program will come pre-installed on every Dell, hopefully this plug-in will be as well. I just started using it and it's pretty slick.

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.

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?

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...

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

Microsoft still does lots of good technology, so I guess it depends on what you're interested in.

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.

There's a difference between winning a market with better business practices and winning a market with a better product. All signs point to Microsoft's ability to do the former being stifled by everyone else's ability to do the latter.

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

"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.)

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...

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.

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.

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.

> I think it's under the HR division.

Then Microsoft indeed doesn't get it.

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?" :)

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.

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

That's kind of the point of the article though -- they're just getting by with the bare minimum, because they don't really care about the web. The consumer doesn't care, but a web company should care.

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."

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)...

They are yet to say: "Microsoft is Search"

powerset.com?

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.

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

"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.

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

indeed it is not.

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