Google Pwns Microsoft on Chrome and Hotmail

You have got to love how brutally competing developers slam each other. When Google released a patch to make Chrome work with Microsoft Hotmail, Googler Matt Cutts chided Microsoft on being slow to fix the incompatibility. “Normally you think of Web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter,” goes Cutts’ cutting remark.

Microsoftie Omar Shahine, not too pleased, told Google to try rapidly iterating a massive Web service themselves sometime. He even threw in a jab at Chrome. “That’s a rather naive statement. You think that Hotmail is a Web page and you expect a service with hundreds of millions of users and thousands of servers to stop what it’s doing, fix a bug for a browser that the majority of its customers do not use, and spin up an out-of-band release? We’ve already committed to addressing this issue in our next service release (already started to roll out to the site) which IMHO is an acceptable reaction,” whines Shahine.

Apparently, Shahine forgets that rapidly iterating massive Web services is exactly what Google’s famous for. “Google runs Web services with many users and servers too and we launch changes weekly or faster,” Cutts rebutts.

Get with the times, Microsoft. Half-decade update cycles (coughVistacough) might work with boxed software, but they’re completely inexcusable with software as a service. Or were you just using your outdated mentality as an excuse to break Chrome in Hotmail? Cutts cuts to the point: “The equivalent code on the Hotmail side would be if (user-agent == Chrome) { render_mode = Safari; }. Hotmail has had months to do this simple change and hasn’t.”

In this particular argument, I believe Microsoft is what forumers would call pwned.

(Via Stephen Shankland.)

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