Standards and Marketing

Consistently Crappy Software from Microsoft and Its Impact on the Internet

December 27, 2004

Have you ever noticed how M$ hasn't gotten a product past beta in about 12 years?

Yea, they did. They just chose to use their own definition of 'beta'. If they used everyone else's version, then IE6 would have had pop up blocking and worm prevention from the start, but instead they decided to wait until After SP2. Elliot Schlegelmilch

How about CSS or DOM support? Or, well, maybe start with HTML support before getting to advanced things like that...

Yea, they're too busy inventing their own proprietary tags and activex crap. Maybe the firefox zealots will get the ball rolling once they hit their goal of 10% market share. Then your marketing department might remove your shackles. Elliot Schlegelmilch

No. you see, compatibility, usability, and accessibility are not priorities. What has to be our top priority is appearance. The site needs to look professional and sleek, and if that reduces usability and compatibility, then so be it. Toward that end, since, according to the person responsible for the web site content, text looks 100% better 100% of the time if it is in an image, we will be using that technique in many places. Besides, everyone has at least 79 T3 connections per computer, so bandwidth is not an issue, and there isn't anyone who isn't running longhorn on a P7 8.9GHz machine, so there's no issue with rendering time...

Not that I'd get bitter and bitchy when that comes up...

Of course, another one I just discovered is that my page loads in Firefox are not counted by Hitbox, but my page loads in Mozilla, Opera, and IE are...

If you could say that a couple of pages would be static (relatively) for the next week or so, makes me want to see how slim I could make them with nice clean tidy html and some killer css. Maybe the front page and a case study and a product page. Elliot Schelgelmilch

Well, since the text all needs to be in images, it doesn't really matter, now does it, and since IE doesn't support CSS, we need to have 100% ie support, and let things be a little flaky in other browsers if necessary...

I'm not sure that it matters, anyhow, due to the conversion time and the issues with compatibility with our product...

I was actually asked if I expected people to believe that our competitors had sloppy, amateur, and unprofessional sites, and when I said "yes," I was told that that was not an acceptable answer. It didn't matter if our site was more correct, what matters is that our site is attractive to the untrained eye and is easy to use (or, rather that the marketing people think it may be easy to use, not that it actually is), and that our efforts to improve browser compatibility needed to come in second to making the site more attractive and catchy than Seibel Ondemand, SalesForce, and our other competitors' sites. I was told:

Standards compliance makes a difference to engineers, but does not really matter when it comes to users. What the users see are crapy compatible sites that they don't want to go back to and nice looking sites that they do want to return to.

I was actually told that what matters is that people come to the site and read the information, but they refuse to acknowledge that things done to reduce the deliverability and comprehension of the site could reduce the likelihood that someone would read the content...

What the marketers don't get is that compatibility and usability really do come together. Making the site more compatible will get the information to more people. It will also simplify maintenance, and increase productivity internally. Working within the standards and making the site more compatible will also help with search engine rankings by allowing the search engines' spiders to better understand the site - not to mention making them able to navigate the site.

Of course, compatibility and standards compliance won't help much with SEO when the content is not relevant to what people are looking for anyhow.