Sign in / up

* Posts by gcaw

3 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011

Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense

gcaw
Reply Icon
WTF?

Pierre, you poor foolish child. WTF are you on about?

I didn't say it was a "slip of the tongue"; I said it was some poor phrasing. The structure of this phrasing is as if Amazon were to say that its site provides an "integrated shopping experience", and for every other website to cry foul and start shitting their guts out in fury at the absurdity of the suggestion that there's any such thing as "integrated shopping" in and of itself. Of course, there isn't, but when you put it into context, it makes some sense.

What I find inexplicable in this whole nonsense situation that's exploded is why, if 'native HTML5' is supposed to be part of some major Microsoft offensive to distort the truth and misrepresent the way that HTML5 is supposed to work, there's been no other mention anywhere else, on Microsoft sites or materials, of what this 'native HTML5' creature supposedly is. If it's the next big Microsoft thing, something that's been weeks and months in the planning, and pored over by teams weighing up each and every word of the speech as you suggest, why is there nothing anywhere defining what native HTML5 is versus ordinary, non-native HTML5? Where are the Microsoft supportbase pages? Where are the Microsoft marketing pages? Where are the Microsoft press packs, detailing native HTML as a 'thing' compared with bog-standard, unremarkable, peasant's HTML5? Perhaps all those waving their pitchforks will insist that the explanation is that Microsoft destroyed all such references as soon as the backlash began. Riiiiiiight. Sure.

Regarding your second and third oh-so-compellingpoints, if we indulge your position to the point that every last person in the room had been a mid-level manager with zero development experience, it wouldn't make any difference in terms of perpetuating the apparent lies that you and others seem to believe Microsoft was trying to sell. At some point those managers would take their marketing buzzwords back to the actual developers who DO know their shit, and when they start hearing about "native HTML5" as a thing, those real developers aren't going to be blinded and bedazzled by the marketing bullshit any more than if they'd been in the room themselves. The point, which you either ignored or were too stupid too understand, was that Microsoft had nothing to gain by trying to sell a big lie about development to the developers themselves, whether through middle manager intermediaries or directly. And even if the room itself hadn't been filled with true-blood, experienced, career developers, thousands will have been watching online.

To put this into the similar example I made in an earlier post, you're saying that the plane makers have gone in to tell a room full of pilots that the sky is filled with treacle, not air. You're also saying that, if half or all of the room were filled with airline managers rather than pilots, that upon hearing the story from the managers, the pilots would actually believe it because they'd be hearing it second-hand with a load of marketing buzz phrases to convince them.

To drag this back to the current situation and ram it into your face one more time, you're seriously suggesting that developers would be more likely to believe something that makes no sense to them simply because they've heard it from a middle-manager? And moreover, you seriously think that Microsoft believed that too, and that that was the reason they chose - that they specifically pored over and deliberated, and ultimately selected - that particular phrase of "native HTML5", believing that a sizeable chunk of the audience in attendance and watching on the web wouldn't know any better? And you genuinely believe that Microsoft decided that the best time to try to con its developers with such a foolish gambit would be at its developer-focused event? And you believe that Microsoft didn't consider for a moment that at least of its developers somewhere might put up a hand and say "hey, this 'native HTML5' thing isn't a thing at all?'"

Wow, you're really not very bright, are you? Astonishingly, eyewateringly stupid, in fact.

By the way, Microsoft isn't the first to use the phrase 'native HTML5'. This Google Chrome Extensions page - https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gncnbkghencmkfgeepfaonmegemakcol - for example made mention of "native HTML5 notifications" last year. Another example popped up on Comscore - http://www.nedstat.co.uk/nedstat-news-archive/374-stream-sense-supports-native-html5-video - in 2009, referencing "native HTML5 video". The HTML5Rocks site - http://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/dnd/basics/ - also made mention last year of "native HTML5 drag and drop".

So why do all of these examples go unadmonished, yet when Microsoft tries to talk of "native HTML5" in the context of an integrated IE9+Windows solution being supposedly best for browsing and web-apps (at least in terms of how they'd *like* to be perceived - whether that perception is true or not is an entirely different discussion), it's time to go crazy, ignore all logic, and instead seek and believe every possible reason - no matter how improbable or foolish - to portray Microsoft as knowingly telling unbelievable lies to the very last group of people who could ever believe them?

0 1
gcaw
Megaphone

The anonymous coward got it: it's called marketing, folks.

Two things surprise me here - and really, neither of them should.

The first is that so many people are willing to continue believing any explanation that characterises Microsoft as stupid, or liars, or just plain evil, even in the face of perfectly reasonable discussion about how this is almost certainly just a misinterpretation of some poor phrasing. Microsoft has historically been the most open ecosystem (I'm not talking open source code; I'm talking about the openness - as opened to a locked-down and heavily controlled state), the most compatible environment in which the widest range of software can work on the widest range of hardware. Openness has always been the key to Windows success, and the key to the success of money-spinners like Office as well - the more systems that have Windows, the more can run Office and all the other programs that make money for MS.

I don't really understand why, against that backdrop, everyone suddenly believes that Microsoft should be trying to breed an atmosphere that ignores the spirit of openness and intercompatibility by telling very easily disproved lies about something like HTML5 - to A ROOM FULL OF DEVELOPERS. I could just about bend my mind around the idea that MS might go into a room full of foolish end-users and try to sell them on the idea that HTML5 will only work as part of an IE9 + Windows solution. But to suggest that Microsoft would try to make that statement, or to make any statement about there being such a thing as "native HTML5" to a room full of the very people who know this stuff as well as anyone, if not better, makes absolutely no sense. Everyone would see right through that, everyone KNOWS everyone would see right through that, and everyone knows that such an attempt would fail.

That would make about as much sense as Boeing marketmen going into a room full of pilots and saying that their new plane is better than all the others because it's designed to fly through treacle, which is what the sky is made of.

The second thing which surprised me is how readily people are to believe that, because I disagree with the angry pitchfork-wielding consensus, I must therefore work for The Beast. I know it's difficult for some of your narrow minds to conceive, but some of us are able to form opinions for ourselves without them being formed by either a corporate mastermind or an angry mob. I don't work for Microsoft, and in fact the points that I made were related largely to making sense of what was said, rather than defending anything that Microsoft has done.

I'm actually a brand and marketing consultant, so I understand the broader landscape of Microsoft's strategy for marketing IE9, and how they're trying to position it as an integrated part of Windows, and how - by extension - they're trying to say that the best way to experience the web is with IE9 in a Windows environment. They've already started explaining that proposition with positions like "the beautiful web", and they're now trying to take that further by stating that the web isn't just more "beautiful" with IE9+Windows, but also performs better.

I think that what a few of you seem to misunderstand here is that when I'm trying to explain what their marketing position is, it's not because I'm part of their marketing machine. I can explain to you what the 'master race', eugenics and concentration camps are too, but that doesn't make me a Nazi.

Honestly, some of you really need to put the pitchforks down, take a deep breath and reach out for a bit of logic to guide you here, instead of just furiously spitting teeth at the sheer brazenness of it all. Marketing can certainly distort reality - in fact, in many ways, that's exactly what it's there to do - but marketing is also about KNOWING your market before you try to make a pitch to it. Microsoft may do a lot of stupid, stupid things, but going into a room full of people who know their stuff and trying to tell them that up is down doesn't make a lot of sense - and Microsoft going into a room full of developers and trying to sell them on the idea of "native HTML5" when none of them, not one of them, is going to swallow that pill, is one of those concepts that's so completely batshit crazy that the only people it makes to appear stupid are those who are trying so hard to believe that that's what happened.

This was a marketing-based pitch to sell developers on the idea that they should continue developing for the Windows ecosystem, because Microsoft's marketing machine will be spinning around the idea of IE9 being integrated with Windows, and IE9+Windows being the best/prettiest/highest-performance way to enjoy the web/HTML5/web-apps etc. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

3 3
gcaw
WTF?

Don't take this the wrong way... Oh, too late.

Wow. I'm a little surprised by how many people have got the wrong end of the stick here. Most of it seems to originate from incredulity and noise made by those with a vested interested in being opposed to IE9 (Opera, Mozilla et.al), but there sure are a lot of people gladly eating up the Pie Of Stupidity.

No-one spoke of "native HTML" (as opposed to "non-native HTML"); the mention was of "native HTML5 experiences", where the adjective "native" describes the noun "experiences", not the noun "HTML". This might seem like a semantic point, but it actually goes to the heart of the point that was being made: the native element is the browser within the OS.

Microsoft is trying to create a marketing point of a browser integrated and designed for the operating system that it runs on. IE9 is designed for Windows, and Windows only (and soon, it will be on Windows Phone too). IE9 is not available for iOS or MacOS or WebOS or Android or any flavour of Linux; it's not even available on older Windows versions. This is an internet browser that, in marketing terms at least, is designed to work at its best with certain operating systems, which is why it is supposedly offered only within those frameworks. Tight integration with Windows hardware acceleration paradigms and components such as Silverlight support this proposition on paper at least, although demos of IE9 HTML5 performance on desktop and mobile both seem to back up the hype to some degree. The blurring of lines between a website and web-app with pinning of sites to the Windows 7 taskbar - with jump lists and elements like the new Hotmail 'new messages' notification - also support the marketing of IE9 as both a browser and an integrated element of the OS.

Ultimately though, it comes to the point that Microsoft is trying to drive home here. They argue that all these lovely browsers that happen to run on Windows are all well and good, but as good as the Firefoxes and Chromes and Safaris of this world are, they're not built in such a way that uniquely supports the requirements of a Windows system, which - they will also argue - IE9 is; the end of their argument is that because IE9 is designed to work so closely with the OS, that makes it the best possible solution through which to get the best possible HTML5 browsing and app experience.

I'm not going to discuss whether or not that is true, because I believe that there are far more intelligent and knowledgeable people that read this site who will make the arguments for and against much more capably than I ever could, and I hope to learn a good deal from those discussions.

I simply wish to point out that the whole basis of the article - despite being an enjoyable bit of fun at Microsoft's expense - is undermined by the misinterpretation of what was said. Of course, there's no "native HTML", and Microsoft isn't pretending otherwise. But the marketing strategy of Microsoft for IE9 is very clearly geared towards the browser as an integrated component of Windows, and this is what was being spoken of early with mention of 'native experiences'. I'm always up for poking fun at Windows - or anyone else for that matter - when they deserve it, but I find it a bit more difficult to have a laugh at someone's expense when it's based on a distortion of the truth.

Either the guy from Opera isn't very intelligent or he's deliberately misrepresenting what was said - after all, cross-platform browsers suffer most in a world where platform-specific browser development is king - but either way, he should shut the hell up, and El Reg should take the microphone away from his piehole.

In fairness, of course, he's clearly not the only person to read into this the wrong way, but I usually consider El Reg the voice of reason in a crowd of lunatics foaming at their mouths and bursting a tit in disgust. Why, Reg, why are you not shining a light of clarity upon these poor fools? Why are you perpetuating the foolishness?

3 5