The rumors this week about Microsoft buying a stake in Yahoo! were interesting. More funny perhaps, but interesting. Personally, I think it's a looped idea. Good for Microsoft, not good for Yahoo! and our customers (unless we take over search for them)... but that's just me and not what I wanted to talk about.
I've been using a couple of new MS products lately and am a little curious about what they are doing. First there's IE 7 beta 2. This is my first experience with IE 7 and it's a pretty ham-handed product. I couldn't find the the refresh button let alone the back button. I'm a clicky guy; I use key commands for printing and tabbing. I think I had trouble because the toolbars are blended together. There's no differentiating line to separate different interface elements. At this time, I seen no compelling reason to use it. More secure? Really?
How long has it been anyway? That's what scares me the most about a MicroYahooSoft arrangement, it would be like pouring glue on snail-shoes.
I've also been using shopping.live.com (don't try it with firefox), which is Microsoft's ajaxy shopping site within the Live.com network. I'm not sure what they're trying to do... who's their audience? Is MS so cool that you'd use Windows Live as your homepage or shopping engine? Oh that's right, they control the OS which means they control everything else.. eh... With that said, there are some things that I like about this shopping site...
First some of the interaction is nice. Though I don't know how many people are going to understand it. Dragging and dropping is a very foreign concept to most people. But they're trying. Their shopping guides are good. I feel that they are pretty much a rip-off of our Pick Lists but they are allowing more content to be written, and have done a better job of integrating them into their site than we have. Including search.
I like their hover function for reading more information about a product in search results, and I like how they incorporate compare and the shopping list as a persistent element.
I don't like how slow it is and I have no idea why they decided to hide search at the top of the page. It totally blends in with the design and is almost invisible. All in all, I envy them in a way. It would be great to build a new Yahoo! Shopping site from the ground up with a small, strategic development and design team. Everything would fit together and have meaning. We could get rid of the clutter and focus the site on what's important. Monetization would come second to user experience and satisfaction. Plus we could move away from a big company development process and get back to a more agile and entrepreneurial way of doing things.
