Microsoft tries to force you to buy, and what they end up with is a customer base that at best thinks the product is OK.

There’s a great book out by Jeffrey Gitomar called “Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless”, and someone at Microsoft needs to read it, before they become the next General Motors.

If there was any evidence, we’d be reading about today’s e-mails here, not about those from 10 years ago.

Dave Greiner, a member of the Email Standards Project, was distressed in 2007 when Microsoft decided to use Microsoft Word’s relatively rudimentary technology to display HTML-encoded email in Outlook. Facing the extension of that choice in the forthcoming Office 2010, he is shouting louder for change. Greiner set up FixOutlook.org …
Microsoft previously used Internet Explorer’s HTML rendering engine to display emails formatted with HTML, which was developed to describe web pages to browsers.

The rest of us can look forward to lots of broken html email. The victims include the users who mistakenly think M$ is using web standards. The only thing less secure than IE, Outlook or Office is using all three at the same time. Idiots.

What about SVG and MathML support (these are already published standards)?

What about HTML 5, XSL:T 2, Canvas, CSS 3 and other in-develoment standards that other web browsers are standardising on/implementing?

Microsoft only started caring about IE after they started losing market share due to better browsers. The other browsers are innovating and pushing forward.

Microsoft *has* done a good job supporting CSS 2.1 and WAI-ARIA, but they still have a long way to go.

Today? These are e-mails from years ago.

Some of those same people still work for Microsoft (directly). Some work for it from the outside.

I can’t believe they’d be talking like this today

Today? These are e-mails from years ago. In fact, they are so old that they could just as well have been exhibits in the US DoJ vs. Microsoft.

after the flap over Outlook yesterday

Could you elaborate on that?

Recently, Microsoft started a marketing program where they claim that whatever browser you use cannot read websites as well as can their IE8 http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2009-06-18-001-35-NW-MS&tbovrmode=3#talkback_area .

The emails show it is not just about adherence to W3C standards, but that there are many more *extensions* beyond the standards that create problems.

Plus, their source is closed. That, conveniently and almost unavoidably, creates some barriers to interop even where standards are involved (subjective acid tests can help mitigate this problem).

Further, as Rob Weir showed recently with ODF formulas, Microsoft appears wholly unable or unwilling to fix their interop issues even when many other much smaller groups get it right. They even manage this failure while using the excuse that they follow the outdated standard fairly closely (which apparently they do).

Microsoft’s business model has not changed too much. Though it has become even more dependent on patents. The patent strategy and focus is revealed partially through their increased filings and other internal emails. They are still a monopolist trying to leverage monopolies to preserve their control and profits. They still use opaque closed software because closed source provides a clear barrier to interop.

A major Microsoft sell of their partnership with Novell is the alleged improved interop. This implies they are not making public the information necessary for interop but instead rely on specific partners/avenues. They still add a huge amount beyond the core standards, and even the core standards are implemented with their own set of bugs which are not published openly.

Since Microsoft appears unwilling or unable to travel the same number of miles much smaller competitors travel for the sake of interop, I think antitrust authorities should consider requiring Microsoft to open source at least the parts of their software stack that have been commoditized. They would have to reveal, for example, the details of their core OS features and the details to the old Win32 API (their functions are old and common, if perhaps the interop details still remain obscured). Ditto should go for the vast majority of IE and most other software, especially where Microsoft software does not offer improved performance or any other significant benefit beyond interop.

I think it’s safe to say that interop failures with competing products, and not innovation, is responsible for Microsoft’s dominance today to a very large extent. They are under-priced by open source and by many other vendors, don’t offer the same level of transparency as open source, and sometimes lag in features, yet a major reason for Microsoft being chosen over others today is still the fear of and substantiated interop issues. Microsoft does not mix well with competitors.

http://www.creativestable.com/blog/stop-lying-yourself-internet-explorer-you-bag-shit-motherfucker

The point is that the article says a lot of Microsoft’s attitude today. And that attitude is directly related to the issue of Mono.

Thumbs down for another unneccessary article.