Microsoft deliberately holds back web development to fight Google.
Microsoft has a history of slowing development in web based technologies that could undermine it’s market dominance. This has a direct effect on me as a front end web developer [think of the children!], as well as slowing overall economic growth by stifling innovation.
Office 2007 containing Outlook was recently released which displays HTML emails poorly. This has been well documented at Campaign Monitor and there are instructions from Microsoft for how to mitigate develop for it here. In short, the latest version of Outlook (Office 2007) uses the new version of Microsoft Word’s rendering engine rather than the rendering engine of Internet Explorer (IE) 7. Word 2007 has worse HTML and CSS support than Internet Explorer 6. This means that many of the web technologies that were improved in the latest round of the Browser Wars are now rendered useless because of one decision by Redmond. Which leads me to the pertinent question…
How can Microsoft make such a short sighted judgement, if it wasn’t in their overall business interests, to use a bad HTML rendering engine in one of their flagship products when internet technology is heading in the other direction? They have billions of dollars in reserve, a highly successful gaming console and online media content delivery system, and recently simultaneously developed and released IE 7, Windows Vista and Microsoft Office. Why can’t they employ managers to provide strategy and oversight between different development teams.
It is about here where I cross that boundary from disgruntled web developer to conspiratorial nut-job. I see something awry when a corporation as large as Microsoft continues to make apparently backwards decisions or drag the chain when it comes to web development. It is not the first time that they have done this. The delay in release between IE 6 and IE 7 was 5 years. This is comparable to the time it took them to release the next versions of Windows and Office. However developing one browser is a much smaller programming task than either an operating system or an entire suite of programs. In comparison Adobe have released a new version of Photoshop, arguably a far more complicated piece of software, every one or two years since 1990 along with many other products. So Microsoft, what is going on here?
Microsoft is a corporation and it all comes back to it’s business model and it’s bottom line. When the browser wars were at their peak IE updates came thick and fast. Then when Netscape fumbled and released Netscape 6 (bleurgh!) Microsoft released the nail in the coffin that was IE 6 and stopped developing. But Microsoft didn’t stop developing other things. They released the DotNet framework which expanded IE’s ability to run applications through software developers who could transport code from desktop apps to web browser apps. These applications either won’t function or function badly in other browsers. This keeps Microsoft in the money.
Then along came Web 2.0 and Firefox with rich internet applications that were built on open-source and standards. Web developers pushed the limits of what could be done inside a browser using existing technologies which has culminated in AJAX (HTML/CSS/Javascript with web requests to servers). IE 6 began losing significant market share for the first time since 1998 and IE 7 was finally released at the end of 2006. Thus Microsoft is being forced to accept there will be web based applications built on technology which they don’t own.
Which brings me full circle back to the email issue. Office and thus Outlook still have a stranglehold on the business market. They can make ‘mistakes’ with impunity, no other competitor is currently in a position to immediately capitalise. The more standards based the internet is, the easier it is for competitors and the open source community to build applications which compete with it. Thus in an attempt to keep email development from progressing as fast as web development I believe they have deliberately retarded Outlook. As most emails will be sent and received using Microsoft Office, this then slows third parties from building online web systems that could harness new technologies. XML feeds mashing up with email? Not for the next five years.