CHEATATJOE'S

I had this waiting for me in my beloved, junk-collecting Hotmail account this morning. 

Those who know me I’m no fan of Microsoft — not because of their business tactics, but because of their software quality. In fact, I’m probably less comfortable with Google, but I’m certainly a slave to that great overlord, and verily. 

Microsoft is always a few steps behind everyone else, and for years has been on a completely reactionary development cycle. As a company in the tech industry, Microsoft has become a joke. The notorious vitriol developers everywhere spew over Internet Explorer, and the lack of any sort of positive response from Microsoft in an effort to fix these problems, is a prime example. Microsoft doesn’t develop products that play well with others, and it’s hurting them. 

This is evidenced with the latest desperate attempt to get people to stop using Google in favor of Bing. Bing is doing…poorly.

It may be that Bing works well as a search engine. I have no way of knowing because when I go to bing.com, i am greeted with this, which is far more than I want to see from the home page of a search engine. But they can’t just have something clean, like Google’s, because then it would look like they were copycats. 

For some reason, Microsoft still has not grasped the fact that users want the opportunity to build their own user interface. You give them a blank slate and let them create what they want out of it. Instead, you are presented with all of the things Microsoft thinks you should care about, which has very little to do with the things I actually care about. 

Microsoft needs to stop trying to spin off of others’ great ideas, and have a good one of their own. Then they need to create it so that it actually works. Then they need to not charge Apple prices for it. Maybe, just maybe, that’ll put them back in the game.