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Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

The condescending attitude Microsoft has for users and developers can also be seen in their responses to Reddit's Q&A with the IE9 team:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...

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Yeah, when I was at Microsoft we were really out to get the users and the developers. Are you fucking serious? I expect it at Reddit but not here.

I didn't say MS was "out to get the users", I just mean that every response Microsoft has to perfectly reasonable questions like "why don't you support [insert standard here]?" has the same patronizing tone like "we've listened to our customers and delivered a product that they are satisfied with".

Example? They may be skirting around saying something straight out for legal reasons (either proprietary or getting sued by a competitor).

* Would it have killed you to have included a built-in spellchecker?

For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.

* Why no Websockets support?

We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today

... every answer is like this.

First, yes, it's in "professional speak." Given that some people from marketing are overseeing this, I would just expect that. The answers, however, don't strike me as condescending.

Dev translation: we actually tested this. People didn't care enough about built-in spellcheck.

I don't even have anything to add to this. They looked at who's using websockets and the standard. No one is using it. In fact, I don't see why IE is getting a bad rap for this -- none of the browsers currently have websockets enabled while the standard is being fixed. The rest of their comment is marketing-translated: "We do care about standards though, which is why we implemented the more common ones."

It's not a conscious decision to be hostile, just an effect of Microsoft's cultural norms and attitudes.

It's really not. Do you actually know any Microsoft developers? It's just impolite for people at Microsoft to say: "Reddit says it wants this feature but we haven't implemented this feature. Why? Because we have done a massive user study in the past year on this and there are fewer than 1% of users (power users only) who actually care."

What you say is probably true, but it is severely broken. Let me give an example.

If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standards support will get them better web content.

Therefore IE decides that better standards support is not a priority. And doesn't implement it.

Conversely if IE did decide to implement better standards support, everyone would be better off.

However Microsoft wouldn't get much credit for it, because it wouldn't be obvious to users how important Microsoft's role was in making things better. And developers would say, "Finally!" But then curse Microsoft for years anyways because it takes that long to get the old, broken, browsers off of the market.

The result? IE is crap. And will remain crap. Indefinitely. And Microsoft is convinced that this is not a problem. (And for them it isn't - except for the also invisible problem that they have developed hiring problems in part because many good developers can't stand that attitude.)

I think you're being unfair. You act as though they aren't implementing any standards instead of just the ones that make a difference. At the end of the day, websockets is a mess and shouldn't (and isn't) be enabled in any web browser yet. But a whole bunch of other things are. Check the compatibility list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/ff468705.aspx. They actually have pretty solid support for most of the upcoming standards and are playing a significant role in the W3C process itself.

You are tarnishing the MS reputation by being so pushy.

No, I'm just insulted. What jey is essentially saying is that I'm incompetent and condescending, but it's not my fault because I worked at Microsoft. That's patronizing and I'm not sure how you don't see that.

I don't mean that at all, and I'm sorry for coming across that way.

What I intended to communicate was that the incompetence applies to Microsoft as a whole. There's plenty of brilliant and competent individuals who work at Microsoft.

Not that this is limited to Microsoft, but the poster suggested condescension and not malice. For example:

>>Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?

Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process: 1.Install Windows 7 2.Install IE9, and 3.Enjoy the Beauty of the Web. ☺

In a previous comment iamnotobama mentioned dynamic programming -- clearly someone who knows that IE only runs on Windows. I think snark deserves snark back.

Or are those responses as professional as they can make themselves sound? They didn't seem that arrogant to me, just very political and containing context. Microsoft is a HUGE company and it has gotten in trouble more than once for various things.

And, forgive me, but how are their responses bad? In particular, I found their response to why IE doesn't do silent updates to be incredibly acceptable! (not to mention if any browser were to pull a stunt like auto, silent updates, they'd be assaulted more, to no end)

"One of our principles with Internet Explorer and Windows is user choice; this shows up in many places including our approach to updates. We believe users are in the best position to make decisions about what software they want to run. IE is the most widely used browser including being the most trusted and widely used browser with businesses.

As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety. For consumers, we have Windows update which provides a simple notification that a new version of the browser is available and lets the user choose to install or not. Again, customer choice is our overriding principle." (from link)

Also, a question: what would you have wanted them to say? "No, because we'd get in trouble"? Or, "This is the situation. Because of this, we say no".

> And, forgive me, but how are their responses bad?

Great question!

At reddit, we are committed to quality comment criticism. Before the release of this criticism we leveraged Rich Internet Applications to survey our users' core requirements in order to provide the best comment reading experience for our users. I'm pleased to announce that our latest criticism will have full support for immersive webrage typing and HW accelerated upvote/downvote technology.

-Lars

(Seriously, check out this summary of their fabulously well constructed non-answers and evasive bullshit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb... )

Well, I didn't find the IE9 folks as condescending as the Hotmail crew. Their answers are actually very interesting, they don't appear as incompetents.

EDIT: Sorry. I take it back, I just read this:

---------8<---------

iamnotobama writes:

    Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?

Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process:

   1. Install Windows 7
   2. Install IE9, and
   3. Enjoy the Beauty of the Web.

--------->8---------

Really? I thought that one was the most human of their responses because it is so obviously tongue-in-cheek.

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