The Internet Explorer team has a weblog, but unlike so many of their counterparts in other Microsoft product groups they seem allergic to actually using it for more than teasers and marketing doublespeak. Yesterday’s post on IE7 Platforms and Outlook Express is unfortunately typical:
We currently plan to make IE7 available for Windows XP SP2 and later. This will therefore include availability not only for the 32bit version of Windows XP SP2 but also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 SP1 both of which are due to be released soon. As Dean commented in his original IE7 post on this blog we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time…
We’ll share more details about IE7 as we get further along with the project.
No, no, no! The time to share more details about your thinking is now. Tell us what you have planned. Give us a rough idea of timelines. If you’ve heard widespread requests from the community and you don’t plan to address them, tell us why you won’t or can’t do those things. You have several hundred million customers. Why not share a little bit more?
The Longhorn team has been talking publicly about its plans for a couple of years. There are Longhorn road maps that spell out exactly what the broad outlines of the product will be. The IE7 team is a few months away from releasing a beta, which means they probably already have locked-down feature lists and quite a bit of code written. And yet they act like their product plans are classified Double Top Secret, Eyes Only.
The “we have heard the requests for support of Windows 2000 but have nothing to announce at this time” line is especially galling. Translated, it means, “Yeah, we’ve been thinking about this, but we’re not going to tell you a word about why we might or might not do it. At some point in the future, we’ll announce a decision, and it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. Now please stop bothering us, we’re busy writing code.”
IE has a lousy reputation right now, which is why IE7 has been pushed into this year instead of waiting until next year. Want to rehabilitate the browser’s reputation? Start by trusting your customers.
Update: Be sure to read the comments posted at this entry on the IEBlog. I’m not the only one who thinks the IE7 team needs a double dose of cluefulness. In fact, I was pretty gentle, compared to commenters who said:
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“This post is weak arrogant and full of hot air”
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“Stop treating your readers with so little respect. Please blog more professionally. If you don’t have time because you’re working on IE7 I suggest you hire a full-time IE marketing type person who will post regularly and actually answer questions and respond to comments (not just for IEBlog, but elsewhere too). In fact, do it anyway, IE badly needs people with ‘marketing skills’.”
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“I want you to win me back to IE, but you aren’t trying very hard.”
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“ieblog, OTOH, just posts ‘We can’t say anything about anything’ repeatedly. This is absolutely ridiculous, there’s plenty to talk about without going anywhere NEAR future releases. I’ve seen dozens of good suggestions for blog posts on here. Sort it out.
PS Your competition blogs far better than you:
http://feedhouse.mozillazine.org/”
Ed Bott 
Actually, I think the commenters are arrogant and full of hot air (as well as themselves). Unfortunately, most of the commenters on the ieblog act like a bunch of 7 year olds. I’m amazed that the team bothers to post at all.
Maybe if the commenters acted like adults and either accepted the reasoning behind decisions (even if the disagree with them) that had been made, or showed how their desires would benefit microsoft, instead of their own pet desires, preferably politely, that would encourage more substantive (at least from the commenters point of view) posts.
Bill, yes, ieblog has a problem with Firefox fanboys, but it also has a problem of being ridiculously elitist in its approach – with nothing backing it up!
One or two of the technical posts have been really cool. Fiddler was excellent. The index.dat series on one of the personal blogs of an IE developer was fantastic. But posts generally seem to be full of fluff.
But overall, there’s just a lot of hype, which really doesn’t work well without respect. This was meant to be a post about why it’s hard to port IE7 back to Win2k… All we get is “we haven’t made a final decision”.
Actual explanations are great. For example, the one about mime-type handling and the design compromises. Yes, there are always going to be MS haters out there who will vilify IE, but generally it was a great example. But far more often, its just spin. Also, sometimes they should realise its better just to say “we did this for business reasons” instead of trying to coming up with technical excuses which are bound to get laughed at.