Microsoft (Still) Doesn’t Get The Web

Microsoft has a long history of releasing “not ready for primetime” products.  I recently tried to add this blog’s xml sitemap to their “webmaster tools” on Windows Live Search.  I would have to say that their new “webmaster tools” is another in a long line of Microsoft failures. 

When going to the site to add a sitemap, the user is presented with a simple form.  The form asks for the web site address, the address of the sitemap, how you want to verify ownership of the site (the usual meta tag or by uploading an xml file), and the webmaster’s email address.  Seems simple, right?  Not so fast!  Entering http://www.julianhilltech.com gives an error that says “Invalid web address”.  Dropping the http:// at the beginning yields the same result and adding a “/” on the end yields the same result.  Putting http://www.julianhilltech.com/sitemap.xml as the location of my sitemap yields an error that says my sitemap must be in the root of my web site.  Huh?!  Did you look at the URL? 

A quick review of the help file linked to this page yielded no help.  (Quick, show of hands?  Who here has ever found what they were looking for in a Microsoft help file?)   Next, I went to the community forums for webmaster tools.  I didn’t find a fix for my problem but I saw this problem being frequently reported.   Interesting.  Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo but they can’t even create a system to identify a valid web site address? 

The real problem for Microsoft is this–web users aren’t captive to them.  Microsoft’s been able in the past to get away with releasing products that weren’t quite up to snuff because they had a decent monopoly on the desktop operating system.  The web is an entirely different ecosystem.  Live Search is that popular.  Google and Yahoo both outperform Microsoft in terms of traffic and popularity.  Getting webmasters to help feed data into their search engine would be a good move.  Better and more thorough results would greatly help Microsoft’s search engine.  But rolling out “tools” for webmasters to help make Microsoft’s product better that don’t work will only frustrate the very people Microsoft is trying to woo.  They’ll go elsewhere, because they can.  I currently feed my sitemap to both Google and Yahoo.  Will I attempt to add it to Microsoft again?  Probably not.  This is where Microsoft is losing the online battle.  It’s entirely too easy for people to go somewhere else when their products fail to work. 

Tags: Live Search, Microsoft, web, Webmaster Tools