After a couple of map related posts, I found this video of the new stuff Microsoft’s doing with Bing Maps. It looks like the Live Labs guys have even integrated Photosynth photos into the Streetside interface. really dig the seamless display of constellations when you pan up to the sky.
The CEO of Zoho responds to the announcement of Google Wave:
“It comes down to one word: karma. Microsoft just has so much bad karma in this industry that I cannot imagine a company like us trusting them on much of anything.”
“What could Microsoft do to earn our trust? For starters, they could really support all the web standards on IE. IE is increasingly an embarrassment of a browser and a pain for developers to support. The only reason IE is making any progress at all is the competition from Firefox and Safari and Chrome. I know, IE was once known for web innovation, including AJAX - but that was the time Microsoft was really trying to catch up and beat Netscape.”
I agree with his point, but I don’t really agree with how he arrived there. I feel that “web standards” are such a small deal for most web applications that they would never steer you away from the browser entirely, unless support for current standards is really that bad, which in IE, it’s not. As a Firefox user, the reason I avoid IE wholesale has to do with other application-specific behaviors (and mostly small ones): no “openness” to extensions, takes too long to open a new tab, doesn’t save sessions.
IE 7/8 can do everything technically that the other browsers can. It does render pages slightly different than Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but that doesn’t mean those others are rigidly adhering to the standards. All of them adhere to whatever they want and have unique default rendering behavior. I’m not a Microsoft apologist, by any means, but it annoys me when people try to call them out for things that they don’t deserve. Call them out for one of the myriad reasons they do deserve.
