eric e. dolecki

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microsoft not eating its own dogfood?

Tuesday, September 18, 2007   

Microsoft has launched a preview website for their Office 2008 offering. Besides the main navigation being full of undefined values for labels, I noticed one glaring omission on their part. Its delivered as a Flash website. Not Silverlight. I noticed a long time ago that Halo3.com is delivered in Flash too. How many people hit that site? Probably a lion's share, and what an opportunity wasted to get people to install the Silverlight bits on their hardware. And now another high-profile site using Flash as its front-end delivery medium.

Their dogfood must be pretty funky for Microsoft not to be eating it. Perhaps no one knows how to properly cook it yet. Or there are not enough cooks to get a main course prepared. Could it be that this is an example of how Flash is the "microwave" of interactive deployment and Silverlight is the crockpot?

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 Jon MacDonald said...

September 18, 2007 4:14 PM

“I haven't seen the undefined issue you did, but my guess it that the developer didn't implement SWFAddress (deep-linking) correctly, and isn't catching when someone enters an invalid argument in the URL. For instance, try to go here: http://www.macoffice2008.com/#wd_de3333
and you'll get nothing in those menu bars.

As for the choice to develop in Flash, I have some friends who work at the local Avenue-A/Razorfish (recently acquired by Microsoft) office as developers and apparently Microsoft has started requesting all projects be done in Silverlight. The problem is that AA/RF can't find any developers who know the technology well enough to develop full-blown interactive experience sites comparable to the new MacOffice2008 site. That said, MS has been allowing a few sites to be developed in Flash -- the exception being on microsoft.com, where the only Flash that is allowed is in non-navigational elements (so basically restricting Flash to only animate images in a non-interactive fashion).”