[kleneway]

Here's the thing - the really smart people at Microsoft are out there working on the hard problems, like improving facial recognition for image searches, writing software that synchs up your work and home laptops to your phone, making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras and post them directly to Facebook, etc... www.microsoft.com is probably run by someone in the marketing department, with the actual html/css/javascript/Silverlight coding outsourced to either an external web agency or an in-house team of entry-level devs - it's really not a good indicator of whether or not MS "gets the web". Good headline for an attention-grabbing blog post, though.

[Hexstream]

But if Microsoft was a (good) web company, wouldn't they dedicate serious resources to www.microsoft.com?

[lhorie]

Not necessarily. The company I work for is considered one of the best web development in my country and virtually none of our clients come from the front page. We have much more important things to work on than to spend time and money on something that is frankly just there for the sake of being there.

What I'm wondering right now is what do people mean when they say "x doesn't get the web" in the context of companies. There are far more companies out there with not-so-spectacular e-retail websites than there are Googles and Facebooks, but they are all part of the web-as-an-economic-vehicle.

I think that the number of cosmetic bugs on a site is merely a measure of technical competency for whoever coded / qa'ed the site before it went live. Extrapolating this measurement to all Microsoft operations might be a nice excuse for Microsoft-bashing(tm), but I've been finding this sort of articles counter-productive especially when people start talking about such non-scientific measurements such as "getting the web", instead of focusing on things like current research and interesting acquisitions done by Microsoft recently.

[siong1987]

I didn't see any microsoft software that actually "making it easier for average users to take photos from their digital cameras and post them directly to Facebook".

But, the new ilife 09 has exactly this feature. IMO, microsoft has to find a way to make its "advanced" technology useful to people.

[kleneway]

Definitely agree, just had a long conversation with a coworker about MS's need to apply research to real-life products. FYI, here's the "post to Facebook" feature, it's still in beta and was done by an intern this past summer. I believe eventually the photo program will come pre-installed on every Dell, hopefully this plug-in will be as well. I just started using it and it's pretty slick.

[lacker]

Isn't the fact that a company treats theirname.com as outsourceable a great indicator that they don't get the web?