A few thoughts on Microsoft
Nothing coherent here, just a couple of random thoughts I had about Microsoft.
The first thing is the good news that Microsoft will be making real standards compliance the default mode for the forthcoming IE8. This is an about face from their previous stance where the default mode would be to render the same way the IE7 renders, which is to say, IE7’s “standards compliant” mode. I didn’t see this coming, this may make a lot of sites break for existing IE users - many sites are now built with only IE in mind, standards be damned. A good move for the community.
What has me chuckling, more of a borderline guffaw, is that because MS is so ridiculous about standards they need to call IE8’s actual standards compliant mode, “Super Standards!” This because they called their actually not-standards-compliant-mode in IE7 standards mode. It’s Microsoft’s non-compliance with standards that puts them in the bind they’re in today, if they had just made IE7 a decent internet citizen (the way Firefox and Safari are - sure they have quirks, but they largely do the same things) a) web developers everywhere would loathe MS a hell of a lot less and b) they wouldn’t be in this jam today where a public outcry and their decision forced them to back down on an issue and potentially provide a bad experience to their already frustrated customer base (see Vista).
Ah well… and there’s always the ever present bad idea of buying Yahoo. Now the rumor is that they’ll change their offer to 100% cash (where before it was 50% stock swap) and keep the price at $31. If they were going to take on modest debt in the 50/50 deal, will they need to take on significantly more in this 100% version? And what will that do to the company? It’s never had debt before!
As of last year their cash reserves were at a whopping $34 billion. But an all cash Yahoo at $31 would cost MS close to $45 billion. Many of Microsoft’s non-office/OS products rely on their huge cash reserves - their ability to continue on in the face of losing money for as long as is necessary, projects like XBox, Zune and most recently Silverlight. If that reserve is greatly diminished and debt payments are now a part of everyday life, I wonder how those efforts will be affected. With that and all the focus that integrating the two companies will require… I just don’t see this as good for anyone except their competitors.
Speaking of Silverlight - here’s another place where Microsoft is doing itself good and bad. They’re taking on Flash and maybe they’ll actually have a decent run with this one - they just announced that Nokia was building it into their mobile browser at the same time that Steve Jobs said Flash for the iPhone was too slow… I don’t know.
But I was just looking at this TechCrunch post showing off some SeaDragon stuff. It may or may not be neat. When i tried to install Silverlight, everything seemed to go smoothly, I restarted my browser and got the video player… but it didn’t work. I couldn’t play the video, it may as well have been a jpg. Reading through comments shows a lot of other frustration (worse experiences than mine) with the install. Clearly this is beta software - but if you are going to release it to the world and promote it, the install experience should allow you at least successfully install it. This is a real problem - Microsoft needs to pay more attention to the details.
That’s it. Miscellaneous thoughts.
