Comparing Microsoft and Apple Websites' Usability 314
An anonymous reader writes 'In the article entitled Apple vs. Microsoft — A Website Usability Study, Dmitry Fadeyev, co-founder of Pixelshell, compares Apple's and Microsoft's web sites from a usability perspective, and Apple is the winner. Scott Barnes, PM at Microsoft, agrees with him and suggests the problem is because various site sub-domains have different management.'
MS vs. Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:two dings against Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
This issue seems to be getting worse as time goes on. I had grown used to finding the occasional reference to a knowledge base article from a third party site or article to be broken. It seems like over the last year, I've found internal links on their site that are broken. For example, there might be a TechNet article that points to a knowledge base article, and that link is broken.
Microsoft's site is pretty horrible. Their knowledge base is atrocious. If I had to make a wild ass guess, I'd say that I can actually find the solution to my Microsoft related problem by using their support tools only about 25% of the time. For the longest time until Microsoft shut Google out of their site, Google was my preferred search tool for microsoft.com related material. If it weren't for the huge numbers of people using and supporting Microsoft software, they would have gone under from a lack of support. Any other company out there that put out a product that is so hard to support and resolve issues with would go out of business. Microsoft gets a pass because so many people are stuck with the crap that we don't have any other choice but to find ways to make it work. I think it's an almost conscious decision intended to drive people to their PAID support offerings. The two or three times in the last ten plus years that I've actually had to call Microsoft for support, they resolved the issue. One time they even refunded the cost of the support call because the issue turned out to be a bug with their software. On that time they had a hot fix coded and available for me in less than 24 hours.
They both SUCK (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously, neither are very good. Neither allow you to find things quickly. Both make you jump through hoops to get to things (Microsoft Genuine absolutely turned their web site to poop). Both use flash or web 2.0 garbage when a nice simple static web page would suffice. Both are full of condescending marketing rubbish. You might as well be comparing two turd sandwiches. Consider the resources both companies have to throw at the problem.
Think different? Where did you want to be today? Puhlease. I wanted to be on a damned web site that didn't make an infrequent visitor want to commit ritual suicide out of sheer frustration.
Now watch the respective fan boys come to the defense of their favourite pet company and mod this as flamebait even though they KNOW it's true.
Re:What browser? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry. Not that I can specifically reference. All my cross browser work was at a previous job, and I didn't keep my notes. Part of it was the way the javascript engine interfaced with a silverlight video player object.
Re:It is harder ... (Score:5, Informative)
... to maintain a website with more sub-domains and more information. It seems obvious to me that the Microsoft site in general is just gi-normous ... therefore they have trouble epsecially with consistency. Apple just doesn't have as many things on their sites, and rightfully so considering Microsoft is a global giant, therefore the Apple employees have more time to sit around and play with the look and feel and user friendliness of a website. imho
True, Apple's site does have fewer things, but it's not because Apple has fewer products. Apple's site has three decades worth of hardware and software documentation on it. The Apple site still has manuals and system software for Apple II series machines, if you go looking for it.
The illusion that the MS site has "more stuff" is partly a result of poor organization, and partly a result of Microsoft's tendency to release a half dozen different "editions" of a product when one would do fine.
Re:It is harder ... (Score:5, Informative)
I was thinking the same. Does Apple even have the equivilent of Technet or MSDN? Microsoft has a ton of stuff for IT professionals to pull resources. I have only gone to Apples website for iTunes....
Look here: http://developer.apple.com/ [apple.com]
Wish I had mod points here... (Score:4, Informative)
Their "free" support options, being their general and KB website articles, and their newsgroups are pretty hard to get through. Finding anything not driven by a search or external link into their site on their site is nearly impossible, and most of their newsgroups are too busy to actually keep up with. Their paid support is pretty top notch, but it's more expensive to have a handful of issues with them than to get a support contract with Oracle, RedHat or Novell for Linux.
The real annoying thing is they don't have a 301 permanent redirect module setup with their CDN. If a KB article's link moves, then point to it.. if it's outdated, point to the relevant article... I'm really tired of having nothing but trouble re-finding something from 3+ months ago.
Re:What browser? (Score:5, Informative)
MSDN is so bad that 100% of the time I'm looking up a Windows API function I go to google and type:
Re:Broader product lines and divisions... (Score:3, Informative)
While i agree with the rest of your point, Microsoft DEFINATELY has a -significantly- broader range of product than Apple. I'm not familiar with 100% of Apple's offering, so I'm sure you'll be able to prove me wrong on some of these (in which case I'd want to know, since having more products to compare is always a good thign), but what is Apple's equivalent product in the following category?
Content Management
Intranet/portal
Robotics development
Bare metal hypervisor, as well as desktop virtual machines
Game Console
Game publishing
POS, customer relation
Database Server
Antivirus for enterprise servers
Search engine
Business intelligence platform (ok, that one Microsoft just canned recently, but still)
End to end project management
Thats just the stuff thats on top of my head, represent completly distinct products, and it only includes Microsoft's major product lines, not the more obscure stuff they make (of which the list is impressively long. Have you ever heard of Microsoft Solver Foundation? Neither did I until very recently.)
Re:Discoverable URLs (Score:3, Informative)
Try each site with Javascript OFF (Score:5, Informative)
Here's something I found interesting, being a NoScript user.
I went to the Apple website, and not having apple.com in the whitelist, I didn't notice it was any different than normal (I had it whitelisted elsewhere). It was only until I got deeper into the navigation did things start to break. I then realized that apple.com was set to BLOCKED by default (NoScript is a whitelist, after all), yet Apple's site didn't immediately become unusuable. In fact, it degraded so gracefully that I never noticed the differences. There were a few, like how the product scroller (on the Mac page) had a rather un-Apple scrollbar (rendered by Firefox), but everything still clicked and acted normal (I thought it was just a Firefox thing). No, JavaScript was off - with it on, it's as I expect.
I think the ones that failed would've been the iTunes download pages, and the Apple ads (which only let you download the "web" tiny versions - the JavaScript version lets you go all the way to 720p). Maybe even the Apple movie trailers (I can't remember).
It's not often you come across a modern website whose no-Javascript mode is so similar to the Javascript mode, and with very, very few rendering flaws that would normally clue you in.
Either Apple designs their website without Javascript support (or minimal support) or their web maintainers are skillful at the art of graceful degradation.
Re:That wasn't unexpected. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It is harder ... (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit. Apple has far few products that Microsoft. Especially if you discount old, discontinued stuff.
Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software_applications [wikipedia.org]
Apple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Current_products [wikipedia.org]
(The formatting is a bit different, but you can tell that MS has a lot more products.)
Re:GUI Guidelines. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What browser? (Score:2, Informative)
No way, man (Score:3, Informative)
No, it seriously is. Not only is it dead easy to navigate, but you can just type php.net/function_name_here, and it'll redirect you to the documentation for that function.
Dead awesome. And yeah, the documentation is extremely clear, and there is an unusually high number of code examples (plus the area for user-contributed notes, of which 50% are complete noob, and 50% are pure genius).
Re:Broader product lines and divisions... (Score:3, Informative)
So?
Then please name an ERP software made by Apple.
Or maybe an SQL server? A geographic information system then? A CRM solution maybe?
And, since you are so sure that there is no difference between a business user and a home user, please explain to me why a home user would need some CRM software.