Lazycoder

Scoble & the IE team don’t get it.

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

The thing is, whenever I talk with “normal” users (those who aren’t in the computer industry) the first thing they complain to me about are phishing attacks, spam, spyware, and viruses. I have not had a SINGLE person in the plane ask me for Web standards.

So, if I were a Microsoft executive (I’m not) I’d be investing my developer time in solving those four problems before I worried about Web standards.

See, the web standards argument in IE involves two groups of users/client. End users, who only care about spam, phishing, spyware, and viruses and Developers, who care about all those things plus web standards. One group of those users buy your product once, the other group provide application that further the use of your platform. Possibly gaining you new members in the first group (Well I really like this web site/application and it works on Windows so I’ll buy a Windows machine over a mac.). So they are satisfying one group for one guarenteed purchase vs. one guarenteed purchase (the developer) and n possible other purchases.

Not to mention that by forcing developers to “dumb down” web sites so they work with IE,or in some cases force the end user to ONLY use IE to access the site, MS risks alienating Mac users. A group that is growing more and more each day. Which is fine for Microsoft except for the poor MSN group who wants people using the MSN sites no matter what platform they are on. What happens when clients ask the developers why their site looks “funny” in IE or in the other browsers? What do the developers say? I know what I tell the clients, “I could make it look the same in all browser but at the cost of the following functionality and it will take more time and money. If Microsoft supported the standards, I could write the markup and CSS once and have it work in all the browsers”. Microsoft has typically supported it’s platform developers very well. It seems odd to me that they are so resistant in this area. Maybe because they are used to defining the standards rather than having to follow them.