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

November 6, 2005 By

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? Well, last night I had sushi with Sanaz Ahari (and Chris Pirillo and Ponzi Indharasophang). You might not know Sanaz, but she’s one of the key team members that’s building live.com.

She apologized for not getting Firefox support done. She told me she, and her team, had been working 18 hour days to meet last Tuesday’s deadline and she got sick the week before launch so simply didn’t get it done. She says, on her blog, it’ll be “very very soon.”

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.

She also says that Live.com has a lot more to come and that it shouldn’t be judged on its first day in business. It’s now my home page, so I’ll report when new goodies show up.

Update: Scott Isaacs, the guy who invented a lot of DHTML stuff and who is building the framework underneath Live.com, Hotmail, MSN Spaces, and others, just posted his thoughts on this topic and post.

Filed Under: Blog Tips, learning, Microsoft Office, Web
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  • http://blog.nordquist.org Brett Nordquist

    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.

  • http://www.camaban.co.uk/ Adrian Lee

    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.

  • http://www.camaban.co.uk Adrian Lee

    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.

  • http://www.netvibes.com/ Tariq

    hi robert

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

  • http://www.netvibes.com Tariq

    hi robert

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

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    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.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    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.

  • Mikael Gueck

    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?

  • Mikael Gueck

    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?

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    “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

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    “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

  • http://thomashawk.com/ Thomas Hawk
  • http://thomashawk.com Thomas Hawk
  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Excellent…now why doesn’t it fail gracefully with safari

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Excellent…now why doesn’t it fail gracefully with safari

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    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/toocool/

    It doesn’t display if I use IE.

  • http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/ scobleizer

    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/toocool/

    It doesn’t display if I use IE.

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