Excuses, Excuses

CNet is reporting that Developers gripe about IE standards inaction

Complaints over Microsoft's CSS support come amid broader criticisms that improvements in browser technology have slowed to a glacial pace since the software giant crushed credible competition in the market--an outcome that some view as ironic given Microsoft's cries during the antitrust trial that court-mandated restraints on its ability to bundle applications would stifle innovation.

"While it is true that our implementation is not fully, 100 percent W3C-compliant, our development investments are driven by our customer requirements and not necessarily by standards," said Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager with the Windows client group.

Now, I write software for a living. I also am a customer of (very expensive) software. We have and our vendors have what is known as bug-tracking software. This is how we know if there is a disconnect between the customer's requirements and our tools. Even open-source projects such as Mozilla have bug-tracking software. The blogging software I am using now has bug-tracking software. And not only that, but all of the above allow relatively unrestricted access to enter bugs into the system. There is no guarantee that they will be fixed, but at least someone will notice any trends.

This is not so for Microsoft. Try finding anywhere you can submit a bug without paying out money. I don't need support. I just want to submit a bug report. So, Mr. Sullivan's quote is completely bogus. Microsoft cannot know what their customers want. But, I can hazard a good guess. When IE 6.0 on Windows XP renders blogger.com correctly, but IE 6.0 on Windows 2000 does not because of buggy CSS support, that's a bug.