Microsoft had its website (www.microsoft.com) long before most of today’s biggest IT companies were even founded. They have been renovating and developing the look and feel, as well as the usability of the website homepage. The website was once the most visited website in the internet. Not now. Let me put forth some of the glitches I noticed in the website homepage.
I used to visit the Microsoft website on a daily basis until somewhere/2006. Now-a-days I am much more busy due to which I don’t get to visit the website daily. As I mentioned above it was one of the most visited website once. But this is not the case now, primarily due to the emergence of social networking and community oriented websites. Also there is nothing in for a casual surfer in ‘microsoft.com’.
The Glitches
Here I list some of the problems which annoy me when I visit the website. These problems may not seem important to some. It’s just a matter of perspective. Note that this post is not about the whole Microsoft Website; It’s just about the famous ‘Microsoft Website Homepage’
#1. Slow and Bulky: The website is very slow and takes much time compared to other websites having the same amount of content. This may not be noticeable with high speed internet connections, but keep in mind that most of the people still use dial-up connections to access the web. On a dial-up connection, it may look like the website will never load. OK now, before you shout at me, read the next sentence. When I analyzed the homepage, the total size of the contents including the text, images (there were a lots of them), CSS, JavaScripts, Flash, Silverlight etc was more than 500 KB. 
That is nasty. Isn’t it? I foresee a future in which we may need graphics cards to view the Microsoft website.
#2. Processing: While they were designing the homepage, I think Microsoft forgot that javascript does not support multithreading. If you try to open the website homepage in a tab in IE7, the whole IE freezes till the Microsoft homepage has loaded. May be they have a cheat code for doing that. Note that this ‘effect’ will be clearly notable if you are on a slow connection and visiting the website for the first time. After the first time, caching may reduce the page load time. But what are the doing with all these processing? May be some processing power is used for loading the Silverlight content in the page. Keep open the ‘Task Manager’ in Windows and you can see that there are CPU spikes when the Microsoft homepage loads. See a problem reported in the Silverlight website: http://silverlight.net/forums/p/5457/16706.aspx#16706
#3. Spamming?: Whenever I visit the Microsoft homepage, I get the feeling that they only try to update the look and feel (the blue theme which they have been using historically) and the ads in the homepage. Yes; there are lots of ads in the website homepage. It is really irritating to see Microsoft employing this kind of spamming on their visitors. I agree Microsoft is selling their own products; but the use of excessive advertisements in the homepage is not a good practice.
#4. Usability and User Friendliness: Then menu and navigation system is not at all user friendly. The manu is unique for the homepage, and for all other pages, the menu and navigation system changes. This is a big disadvantage since users take time to get used to the navigation system. Read more about this at http://blog.greysheepduo.com/post/8173975
There are some more things I would like to share, but I will stop now for the fear of being labeled as an anti-Microsoft lobbyist. I don’t think Microsoft does care about the number of visitors to its website. They have other things to worry about – Like the number of copies of Windows Vista to be sold…
[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt Microsoft had its website (www.microsoft.com) long before most of today’s biggest IT companies were even founded. They have been renovating and developing the look and feel, as well [...]
Hi, Niyaz PK.
Thanks for the link to your blog – you have some great insight and perspective on the Microsoft homepage. I’ve forwarded your feedback internally so they can get your perspective as well. I’ve included my experience/perspective on the MS homepage based on your points below:
1. The MS homepage is big
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I haven’t measured the size of the page itself, so I’ll make an assumption that you’re right and that the page is 500K. If that’s the case, I’ll admit it sounds a little heavy.
2. The MS homepage takes up too many CPU cycles
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I can’t say I’ve had the same experience of the IE7 freezing up on the MS homepage, however. It’s possible there’s a lot of computation going on in the background but I haven’t experienced that spike.
3. Spamming / Too Many Ads
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I don’t actually share your opinion on this one. I honestly don’t think the page is covered in ads. Yes, we show ads on our page, but as you mentioned, we are a product company and as such this is the main portal our customers see with respect to our products, so I don’t see this as a bad thing. If you have a better solution to showcasing our products on the site, I would be very happy to pass that feedback along! In fact, from your 4th point about Apple being less ad-concentrated, I’d argue that Microsoft’s page less cluttered.
4. Bad UI Design
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Again, I’m going to disagree with you here. I actually think the MS homepage design is quite clean. The resource link you provide to support your case states that a good design first and foremost provides you with an intuitive UI. I don’t quite see why the MS homepage isn’t intuitive; the menu options are plain to see and easily accessible.
And while the UI experience changes depending on the sub-site you pick (which could be changed, I’ll agree), each sub-site provides menu and navigation options that are contextually specific to the topic you are looking at. Even if you look at Apple’s site, they navigation is different across the different options they provide at the top. I don’t see that as bad; in fact, I see it using the same thought process we have in that it provides contextual navigation based on the site being viewed.
Paul
(P.S.: I certainly don’t see your views as anti-Microsoft – I appreciate your willingness to share your opinions on our site and certainly will share it internally. And of course we care about the traffic to our site! It’s the first thing people see when they visit our internet property.
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I have visited your site 044-times
Your site found in Google: position157
Paul,
Thanks for the long feedback. I welcome your comments and the effort you have taken to reply to the post.
(Meanwhile, Your comment was caught by my spam blocker)
No problem, Niyaz. I can appreciate your thoughts and I’ve sent your feedback internally so that the website team can act on some of your feedback.
Cheers,
Paul