Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

scobleizer — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 22:31:17 -0000

Hey, to everyone who says that Web sites should work on all browsers, why aren't you guys jumping all over efforts like this?

http://www.w3junkies.com/to...

It doesn't display if I use IE.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

John C. Welch — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:25:55 -0000

Excellent...now why doesn't it fail gracefully with safari

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Thomas Hawk — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 17:10:40 -0000

Looks like it's here:

http://thomashawk.com/2005/...

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

John C. Welch — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:39:03 -0000

"Yeah, see, Vista will be a month late, Ballmer got a boo-boo"

dude...MS has over SIXTY THOUSAND EMPLOYEES, and one person being sick hoses a product launch like this?

let's hope the Vista security guy/gal doesn't get dumped anytime soon

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Mikael Gueck — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 09:00:06 -0000

What lessons can we learn of this?

It is OK to be late with licensing payments or negotiations with Microsoft if you've been working 18 hour days and someone got sick?

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

John C. Welch — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 07:42:54 -0000

it would help all the "We didn't have time" arguments if there weren't already products out there doing this that work on Firefox and Safari.

The "we don't design for one browser argument" is specious at best when faced with the simple fact that in this case, yes, you did design for one browser.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Tariq — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 06:51:33 -0000

hi robert

have you checked netvibes.Com ? We support ie and firefox from day one.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Adrian Lee — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 05:58:35 -0000

If a product doesn't work by the launch date, the launch date is usually put back a bit. Clearly cross browser support is seen as an expendable feature rather than a strict requirement.

Rather than grumble at the team who built it, maybe it's more the managers who deserve it, for setting unreasonable deadlines (if you're having to work 18hrs a day, it's not reasonable) and deciding to go ahead with a launch for a product that didn't actually work.

Especially when the early adoptors are going to be the more technical crowd, who are much more likely to be using a non-IE browser.

You say the 'blogosphere' is great for calling you out things Robert, well here they've done it(in a general sense, not talking about you personally), and I hope you don't try and deny it deserved it.

Building trust with people who have become disenchanted with MS is hardly helped by preventing them from using non-MS products.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Guest — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 02:39:35 -0000

You are right that software is written by people who are forced to make tradeoffs. Unfortunately, by not supporting Firefox out of the gate, many of the influentials will never come back. How many times have you installed a program and it frustrated you within 30 secons of use? Do you go back to it or move on? I tend to believe that the influentials are not a patient bunch and will quickly move on and not look back.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Tetra — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:47:38 -0000

"Saying that web applications NEED to be cross-browser or cross-platform is nothing short of absurd."

Well, good job on killing the Internet. I mean, the web was built on a protocol that didn't have a bias to a particular piece of software or platform. The web is supposed to be a universal entity, not a tiny little republic of a few.

I'd rather the Web sticks to its roots. If Web 2.0 means fragmentation and a mirroring of desktop headaches, count me out.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

John C. Welch — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:16:01 -0000

Marc, that's Scoble SOP...get angry about something, hang a fellow teammate out to dry, then when he's found out that he should have spent a little time fact - checking he apologizes.

This is at least the second time it's happened since he got burned by "Post first, fact check whenever" himself, and he said he'd learned that being right was more important than being first. Even if it's a teammate.

Evidently, he passed the test, and brain-dumped that bit of knowledge.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Marc Snyder — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 18:14:22 -0000

By the way, remember last week when I said Microsoft doesn’t care about influentials because we don’t support Firefox and didn’t get it working in Live.com? ...
She apologized for not getting Firefox support done. She told me (...) she got sick the week before launch so simply didn’t get it done.
It’s another reminder to me that software isn’t written by machines, it’s written by people, and when deadlines hit sometimes you can’t get it all done and have to prioritize what’s most important to get done.

If that's your conclusion, you're badly mistaken. How about this as a conclusion?

"Next time I have a "disruptive" thought like that, maybe I should make a couple of calls to find out *how come* Firefox isn't being supported *before* posting your rant."

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

John C. Welch — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 17:13:21 -0000

It seems to me that maybe someone on the live.com team should look at Liferay: http://demo.liferay.net/

Seems to me they're doing much the same thing, and cross platform too...even on Safari...hmm

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Richard Brownell — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:34:38 -0000

I went ahead and blogged my thoughts on the blog conversation that has been had with Scoble and the live.com team: http://www.richbrownell.com...

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Richard Brownell — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 14:03:11 -0000

Michael Griffiths: absurb, eh? I never said any app "needs" anything. In fact, it looks like nobody here did. What I said was that a "quality" web app has cross-browser support. In other words, what I said was that live.com is not a quality product.

I don't mean to troll, but I'll happily tell anybody directly that shipping a web product that doesn't work on all major browsers is a mistake. I'll gladly tell them that if they "can't" do it, they have project management problems and/or incompetant programmers. I've done it several times before, on a personal site scale, small business scale, university scale, and worldwide multibillion dollar corporation scale. Don't even pretend it can't be done.

I'm no "influential" in this world, nor have I "disrupted" anything, but I am a web developer. I know my own turf and live.com's launch was far less than impressive.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

butt-head — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:31:46 -0000

Settle down Beavis.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Justice — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 13:28:32 -0000

Is it just me, or is anyone disturbed by the fact these guys were working "18 hour days" to meet their deadline, and still ended up chopping several features? Where was the project management here? I'm sorry if I come across as unsympathetic, but why were they on such a ridiculous time-frame?

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Michael Griffiths — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 12:15:13 -0000

Small note: Saying that web applications NEED to be cross-browser or cross-platform is nothing short of absurd.

The ADVANTAGE of web services/applications is that they CAN be cross-platorm very easily.

However, cross-platform is by no means a requirement, Mistaking an advantage for a requirement is a mistake, and one that could cost an unreasonable amount of money.

You never HAVE to do anything in business. Everything is about trade offs. In this case, not shipping Firefox support carried the trade-off of a fair amount of negative publicity, and dismissal by a large number of people, etc.

That doesn't mean it was the wrong decision. The other decisions the team made may have been (and probably were) far more important.

Firefox support is certainly important to me, because (potentially, at least until IE7 is released) I'm using Firefox. But I'm not making the mistake of dismissing Live.com or what it stands for simply because of a less-than-perfect beta launch.

I'd prefer to have transparency, "warts and all", then a closed-in, lock-down model that releases "shock and awe" products once a while. That's not useful to me, because it's far more difficult to evaulate the future usefulness and applicability of the product to me.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Richard Brownell — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 11:36:51 -0000

Sorcerer: the ironic part is that the fuss is not from people who want to use the service with Firefox or at all, for the most part anyway. The fuss is that live.com had a botched launch. Sure lots of people will end up using it. But live.com's success will be because it's a Microsoft product, not because of quality.

A quality web product that is theoretically for any web user does not launch without cross-browser support. I'm sorry, but this is cold hard fact.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Sorcerer — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:42:28 -0000

Dear god. Whats with all the fuss? It'll be compatible with Firefox soon. So whats with all the fuss about? Looks like some people will whine about anything. When you discuss something, do bring up some constructive criticism after verifying what some of you guys are saying.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

brian w. — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:35:54 -0000

Sanaz,
Sure enough, it does say beta when I go to live.com in Firefox. My mistake. When i go to live.com in safari all I get is the Windows Live logo and a search field. Nowhere does it say beta, nowhere does it say please be patient. That's all I got. That's why I assumed it wasn't beta. I could have done better homework though.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Scott — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 10:22:22 -0000

"Everyone: go read Scott Isaacs’ post on this."

What I saw when I clicked on the link and refreshed 3 times.

"This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

(sigh) Scalability is key.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

Jason — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 09:54:27 -0000

Call me a non-influencial, but support for Firefox is just a plus, when compared to: I couldn't get the damn thing working in IE when it was launched. Most of the RSS feeds would not open up correctly, the only recent product that impressed me even less was Google's RSS Reader. Couldn't even chew up OPML.

Having said that: Start.com and now Live.com are two of the best RSS readers I have used to date. Scott Issacs and team deserve KUDOS for such a great product. If they sucked, you "Influencials" wouldn't even care if it supported Firefox.

A promise to support Firefox "very soon" is fine with me. I can't use Firefox at work anyhow.

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

sanaz ahari — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 09:04:15 -0000

i have posted my comments on my blog...
a few kep points:

- live.com is meant for our users not just influentials, we have a 25% firefox userbase that is why it's important to us.
- live.com is a beta (outlined in red in our logo)
- we will be shipping improvements continuously much like we were with start.com

Re: Live.com to get Firefox support “very, very soon”

brian w. — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 08:48:10 -0000

It sure seems like a lot of this bad hype could have been avoided if they just called it beta. Obviously that's what it is anyway. Scott Isaacs’ post cites that Gmail didn't support Safari out of the gate when it was launched. Then again, Gmail was in beta when they started inviting people to use it. Google were smart about it though. 1. Google didn't draw scads of attention to itself with a huge media event. 2. They stayed invite-only for their beta period. Influentials first, and let us work out the bugs of this inrecibly javascript-heavy application before we open the doors. They did that and it was a hit.