The logo is O.K. Their homepage http://microsoft.com looks like a mix between a "corporate" website template you'd buy for $50 and a domain squatting page with amazon referral links.
Gosh I want to cheer for microsoft but they make it real hard.
Gosh I want to cheer for microsoft but they make it real hard.
The idea of a monolithic website like Apple's or Google's just doesn't apply. It's not part of Microsoft's DNA. Compare:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/home
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-ed...
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc184874.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ms376608.aspx
Other than white backgrounds, it's not very consistent.
IBM is a consulting company and courts mid- to upper-level manager types with purchasing authority. After few seconds on the page you are invited to speak with a sales consultant via a popup.
Apple is focused exclusively on the (premium) consumer space.
Both companies represent top-down totalitarianism (I say this without value-connotation): IBM suggest corporate command and control, Apple has a well-curated walled garden.
Microsoft's site reminds me of one of the more effective university websites.
Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of those companies except as a consumer. My iPhone is my favorite toy.
This serves them well in the Enterprise, where every installation requires customisations (and people can afford to pay for the maintenance of those customisations) but spills over into everything they do, meaning they cannot keep things simple.
The Kin is a case study in everything that's wrong with Microsoft as a company.
In-fighting and turf wars, discarding products they bought up (e.g., Danger) to shoehorn in Microsoft technologies while failing to leverage their own technologies in places where they'd make sense, lack of a cohesive corporate vision, the list goes on.
Ars had a pretty decent post-mortem of the project.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/a-post...
If you're going to go after a very varied audience you should probably think carefully about whether you need to have lots of sub brands (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) so that your customers simply google for the sub brand, or whether you actually can attach some core values onto the parent brand that will be meaningful in all these different markets (e.g. Virgin or Disney). It's no good having a scatter gun product strategy then neglecting your branding and online presence because you sell to everyone everywhere.
Keep in mind neither IBM or Apple had a 20% rate of employee millionaires in 1992.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/business/microsoft-s-unlik...
In HN terms, Microsoft's website[s] is[are] great as MVP's and improvements thereupon.
On the other hand, in terms of Apple's ex cathedra philosophy, then perhaps, yes it[they] is[are] bad.
That was mind-breaking. My brain processed it as, "yes it they is er, what are aaaaah bad".
Metro is actually innovative, yet not ideal for desktop PCs. And it´s just the same with the new Logo: Strict simplicity (which makes Apple great), but not thought through in a way.
To me it feels like there´s a gatekeeper at the top missing asking the tough questions before the product is out of the door. The one that asks: "But does it really make sense and how can we do better" when the managers self-congratulate themselves on the bold moves.
Not to mention it won't even load for me; I guess they don't cache this stuff either.
Why are Apple, IBM, Amazon, Google doing it if it's such a terrible design?
http://www.apple.com/ca/fr/mac/
How do you think they picked which language to serve me in the first place? ;) What you're saying is true about eliminating ambiguity but parent commenter just linked to microsoft.com.
When I had to do this for a site, the waterfall I settled on was:
1. Did they just manually pick a language/is it in the URL? (serve that language, set cookie)
2. Do they have a cookie? (serve that language)
3. Do we support any of their Accept-Language prefs? (serve that language, set cookie)
4. Serve en-us (fallback)
EDIT: oops, changing my language to ``es``, clearing cookies & revisiting microsoft.com didn't change the language. I guess they are just serving everyone at .com English :p
The indexability is an interesting argument, but my response is that there should be a standard mechanism to query, via HTTP OPTIONS, in which languages a resource is available. By doing so, a user agent or search engine can easily index all versions of a resource.
Whether or not such a standard exists I do not know, but Google certainly has the clout to standardize such a mechanism (viz. sitemaps and #!).
For example, maybe that latest product announcement hasn't been translated to French yet. If I send a product list URL to my french-speaking buddy, should the product disappear from the product list?
What I find interesting is that the new logo is not on the en-gb or fr-fr pages in the header bar and they use the old Microsoft trademark typeface. They also use the old Windows logo on, it seems, all but the en-us page. Complete mess in terms of brand presentation.
I thought of that too, but that's sort of like Toyota advertising what sort of engine a car has by leaving the muffler off of all the showroom models. Gearheads can tell the engine by the cacophony in the showroom lot, but everyone else will get the impression that Toyota's cars are noisy.
I'm not convinced that normal people care at all about the addition of a few characters in a URL that gives away what tech stack its working on.
For example: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tt0cf3sx
Accept-Language is trivial to change; on Opera, it's one of the three things on the first tab of Preferences, and I can set it for all sites rather than on a per-site basis.
The content is (should be) identical, and the recipient of your link would most likely want to read the content in his/her preferred language.
If you really wanted to point out to them some discrepancy in the content of some particular language, then just tell them "switch your language to Chinese and look at xxx here".
On sites where linking to a particular language version of some resource makes sense (e.g. Wikipedia), by all means, accept a ?lang=de parameter… it's exactly as much mechanism as a directory component, but it doesn't imply any hierarchical structure, and can be dropped to obtain a "canonical" URL.
Also, language versions of big websites often differ hierarchically as well, with the differences in hierarchy being directly bound to the language. On Wikipedia, the problem is so big that it is actually moved to the domain (the highest level of the hierarchy).
(should be): yes. It should be. In the ideal world of people that constructed RFCs. Sadly, there is a real world out there.
In the end, with my users hat on: I don't care. I want to send a link and I assume that my peer sees exactly what I see. I don't want to care about the details of your technical implementation of your website and whether it is structurally sound in the grand scheme of the interwebs. I also don't want to say "and switch to..." every time I send a link.
Microsoft isn't the only website that does this. It seems like most websites use the URL to specify this kind of thing.
But the top bar could be a few times thicker. It's too cramped. I tried a quick hack increasing the min-height attribute on hpHdr_PriRow to 50px, which gives much nicer proportions.
* In Chrome, the carousel controls at the top right are cut off. Intentional?
* The "For home" and "For work" buttons on the right shrink the margins between themselves and the carousel on hover but never quite bridge the gap, which looks awkward to my eye.
* The carousel is gigantic and hides all the content below it on all but the largest screen resolutions (and I thought Windows 8 is supposed to be running on small portable tablets?).
* The top menu under the logo is extremely cheesy with its thin 1px border on hover, never mind that it's next to invisible next to that massive carousel. When it comes to actually navigating the site to getting the user to Microsoft's products, this menu is failure.
* …
Generally, the entire layout feels a bit like the team that's been responsible for the page for years has been told to 'clone' the newest UI to the best of their abilities.
Intentional, it's the same in every other browser. It's similar to Internet Explorer's new back and forward buttons.
Of course, it's not like Microsoft EVER had a decent or even remotely stylish logo. The bigger concern I would have over the logo is the website, which is amateurish. Honestly, if I did not know this was Microsoft, I would think it was a startup company that paid $50 for a website template, as you stated, and not a very good one.