Gates Expresses Surprise Over IE8 Secrecy

eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"

Comments

Re:In a perfect world

[bunratty]

First, the OP is referring to XHTML, where an error message on malformed XML is required. Second, if IE gave an error for a web page, web developers would surely fix it before the users had a chance to complain much. Fixing legitimate XML errors would be easier than the contortions web developers already go through just to make pages look good in the current version of IE.

Re:Microsoft is collapsing into itself

[miffo.swe]

"It's an amazing world we live in where roughly a year after Vista was released it has 90 million users"

No it has not in any way, shape or form 90 million users. Microsoft has sold 90 million Windows Vista/XP/NT/2000 licenses in total. The funny thing is, any windows license sold by Microsoft since Vista was released is counted as a Windows Vista license.

If you have a fortune 500 company and buy a million licenses to deploy XP they will count as Windows Vista license no matter how you buy them. Then we have all the home users that come to me with their new computer with Vista installed wanting me to install XP and delete Vista from their computers.

Vista is a lame duck considering it was 6 years since XP and there is a pent up want for a new OS. Six years of anticipation and vaporware turned into only minor improvement and in many cases regression.