Thursday, 20 June 2013
The Microsoft Kool Aid effect, in cloud terms
By Don Sambandaraksa | Aug 21, 2012
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PrintOn the day that Microsoft’s re-incarnated Hotmail, Outlook.com was launched, I scrambled to get my preferred name before anyone else grabbed it. All in all, a million users signed up in the first six hours and 10 million in the first two weeks to the email service which was hailed as one of the best yet with an interface (that is not called Metro anymore) that makes Gmail look cluttered.
But since signing up, I’ve barely used it.
While it may be a kick-ass desktop browser based email client, the user experience on my phone is short of abysmal.
The Android client is the same old Hotmail client and is, messy and cluttered compared to the latest Gmail clients. Accessing it through a mobile browser (Chrome on Android ICS) resulted in the site not even loading and spewing out an error.
In this day and age of HTML5 with everyone offering slick mobile-optimized websites, this is inexcusable.
Or perhaps intentional.
Redmond would obviously prefer you access it via its mobile device of choice, a Windows Phone.
Therein lies the problem at Microsoft, this lack of tolerance for diversity and adherence to open standards and how everything had to be linked back to something that Microsoft sold.
Remember Microsoft passport? The single-sign in system that it tried to push to the world? That’s a faded memory now with Twitter and Facebook (and a bit of generic OAuth) filling that void. Passport was perfectly capable and was there first and would have saved people from having to remember usernames and passwords for a hundred and one sites, but it failed to catch on as it was tied in too tightly to encourage sales of Windows Server.
Or how about encrypted email on Windows Mobile? Again, tied in to Windows Server and far too difficult to actually get up and running even for a hardcore geek.
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