Will Microsoft Ever Be Taken Seriously by Web Professionals?
Microsoft has always had two big strikes against them:
- Microsoft builds everything in their own crippled formats.
- It’s appearing that Microsoft will never really embrace web standards, which means approximately 90% of web users must suffer as a result.
At my first job I worked in-house in an enterprise level environment where we were forced to rely on Microsoft’s mostly unreliable junk. IIS would always inexplicably serve users the wrong image. As a designer, trying to build a website in the Visual Studio IDE is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics. We were slowed down by the constant MSDN and licensing issues.
At my previous job we had a partnership with a web hosting company using Windows servers. It was a huge, crippling burden. We were constantly developing solutions that were already available in the open source community. Essentially we were passing this cost on to our clients in more expensive hosting, and longer development times with more bugs in a language that simply didn’t offer as much documentation. And let me tell you, .Net is practically inapproachable if you don’t come from a development background, it’s like building in the dark.
And then there’s the wholly separate problem of cross browser compatibility. I don’t have to explain it, you already know it, and if you’ve working in a Mac only environment then you feel my pain. Clients do not respond well to “Upgrade your ancient browser” they want a site to just work, and that’s not an unreasonable expectation.
Microsoft has recently released a new tool called Expression . The tagline is “Build Your Website Your Way.” My favorite part of Expression Web’s website is this:
Passionate about Standards
Build dynamic, interactive pages that harness the power of the Web to deliver superior quality. Built-in support for today’s modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility.
Is this a joke? I first heard about Expression 3 years ago, and was excited by the prospects. Maybe Microsoft would finally make a decent tool, and maybe this would mean they’d begin to integrate standards. But with the marginal support provided in IE7 and their intentions with IE8, it’s becoming clear that this is all a lot of talk. I think that they’d pretend to care about standards in Expression makes it even more offensive. They should change the tagline to “Build Your Sites the Microsoft Way”
They say the proof is in the pudding but the site they present in the customer spotlight is terrible! Additionally, if you go to the provided URL the Expression built site isn’t even there, it looks completely different. I guess we’re just expected to take the word of “Personify Design, one of Seattle’s premier Web Development and Design firms.” Who? It’s a big bloated mess of div-itis, and the code snippets they show are pretty far from semantic.
Step backwards to last month, Microsoft releases Silverlight, their “Flash Killer.” The first thing I’m greeted by on the Silverlight site is:
To view this video you must install Silverlight, click here to download.
No one wants to install anymore plugins, especially the non-web savvy. Something like 93% of browsers now have Flash installed, why would I want to install something else that will probably be primarily used to show me annoying advertisements? And does anyone want to work with another proprietary Microsoft formats? Does this mean Microsoft doesn’t want the Apple community developing anymore? How are people supposed to respond to this when Adobe just released Flex as open source? And what Flash developer is going to want to switch to authoring in a .Net environment? Most of us are designers, not programmers. And in fact, all the reasons they list as “compelling” for using Silverlight are already standard in Flash.
How is anyone supposed to take a company seriously that constantly contradicts themselves, and stubbornly refuses to give us flexible, modern tools? I want you to simplify my life, not complicate it. Don’t give me more tools, improve the ones you have.
I for one totally agree. Microsoft has made some major mistakes. They are trying to own the web again.
Nick just posted something about Ruby on Rails, but I accidentally deleted it.
What about Rails? I don’t see it taking over for RIAs anytime soon, and don’t see how it could realistically replace something like Flash.