Here’s something REALLY REALLY easy for you to suggest Microsoft fix – quit stripping trailing “/’s” from URL pathnames that should be there in your search results!

I.e. trying doing a search for “hulkmobile” on http://search.msn.com/ and look at the entries for “Alek’s Hulk Car” … note that the target URL is http://www.komar.org/hulk … WITHOUT the trailing / … but if you surf there, the web server has to do the right thing FOR you and redirects with the trailing / …

The search engine should really show the correct URL (with the trailing /) and this is such a simple thing that Microsoft should get it right … on the other hand, Yahoo makes the same mistake!

Google, no surprise, does do the right thing …
alek

Our experience has been that the ability to innovate and deliver new UI facilities rapidly through a Web browser (which Web browser for a start) is much more constrained than it is on a client desktop environment. Not that impressive UI cannot be delivered through a Web browser – the new Web front end to Exchange looks scarily like Outlook. But I suspect that most of the important lessons about how the UI should work were determined from years of building and improving Outlook first on the PC.

Of course, there is a middle ground, where services are available from a network through a Web services interface API, and the client interface can be built either using Web browser technologies or as a thin client. The customers can then choose which interface they prefer.

I agree with John’s remark on the increasing dependence on network connectivity for everyday applications. The other day, our internal VPN failed (for no apparent reason) meaning my Outlook couldn’t communicate with our Exchange server, located in our other office. Everything else worked just fine on the Web, even the Web interface to Exchange interestingly. Had the entire connection failed however, I would have needed offline versions of information to be available to do any work whatsoever.

In an old job of mine inside a computer science department, you could always tell who was really dependent on the network by the rapidity with which people would start clustering around the system admins when network connections went down for some reason. For some of us, it was usually within a couple of minutes

pb: agreed, but look at the Tablet PC, Media Center, OneNote. More coming.

just a thought

Also, Microsoft has a miserable track record of creating desirable products and services. Virtually all of the progress they make in new product categories owes itself to Windows and Office. Xbox, Expedia and SQL Server are fairly impressive. But Windows CE, Windows Media, Windows Media Center, MSN, all of Microsoft search, Mactopia, Microsoft Money, bCentral, etc. are lousy.

JKP