You're killing us Bill
2009-07-03 09:35
Remember the '90s? Those heady days of Grunge rock, Quentin Tarantino films, bad hair and body piercing, when Bill Gates was the richest man in the world? Oh, wait, he still is. Perhaps that explains Microsoft's latest move - it can only be the product of decades of extreme arrogance.
What's made me so angry? At the end of June Microsoft announced that they would not be using web standards in their new version of Outlook, their market leading e-mail program.
If that doesn't sound too bad, think of it this way: Microsoft have effectively said "we only care about how e-mails look when they are sent from one Outlook user to another Outlook user".
So if you use any other program, a webmail system like Gmail or (heaven help you) a Mac then e-mails from Outlook users are quite likely to look jumbled up and awful.
And the reverse is even more likely. Since Outlook uses Microsoft Word's "engine" to display e-mail, its users will not be able to see many "foreign" emails in the format they were intended to be read.
Ok, so this doesn't affect plain old text e-mails - only the fancier ones with nice formatting that use HTML (the language of the web). That doesn't excuse this high-handed and lazy decision.
But when a group of concerned e-mail-centric businesses started a Twitter-based petition to ask Microsoft to change their mind, and over 20 000 people around the world responded, did they see the error of their ways?
Nope. They "responded" on their blog by saying, effectively, "Word makes e-mails so pretty. Ooh - charts! Ooh tables with colours! We like pretty. You like pretty. Let's be friends. (Brought to you by Microsoft Corporation - prolonged use may lead to extreme stress)"
Never mind that anyone without Outlook probably won't be able to see those stinkin' charts and tables properly. Never mind that e-mails sent from Outlook are bloated to twice the size they should be by Word's awful HTML engine. Let's all just be friends.
It's this kind of myopic attitude that has seen Microsoft's share of the e-mail market shrink by 50% in the last decade. And yet they really seem to think it's still the '90s and they still rule the world of software.
Guess what guys, you're not that good anymore. In fact, you were never really that good - you were just that lucky, that rich and that unscrupulous. But now you're in third place on the internet behind Google and Yahoo, and mean old Linux and Firefox are stealing more of your customers every day.
Maybe you could just try listening a bit better? It's worked for everyone from Adobe to Salesforce.com to Facebook. Let's give it a try, shall we? What do you think guys? Hello?
Send your comments to Alistair
Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.
- News24