Tonight I came across an update from the IE team. This topic was also covered at A List Apart. Its best to read those articles first - its on a key Web Standards issue (short version: to trigger ’standards mode’ in IE8 a new meta tag will be required on your pages) and I think a thorny one.

Sometimes you read something and instantly you feel that something is awry. I wasn’t alone either (although the author the esteemed Eric Meyer comes out with support for the solution):

As I read through Aaron Gustafson’sBeyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8, my immediate gut reaction was deeply negative. The version-targeting mechanism Aaron described was just wrong, completely backwards, the exact opposite of what we ought to be doing. Every one of my instincts, honed over a decade-plus of web development, was in opposition.

I should begin by saying - I am not one to bag all things Microsoft - I think too many people anthropomorphize companies like Microsoft and Google. In this situation however my gut reaction is to disagree with their proposed solution because it feels like yet another complication is to be added to publishing web content.

The burden of majority market share and a user-base of many millions is certainly something that will throw all sorts of confusing considerations into their pathway and thus I expect some missteps along the way (as I would from any organization).

The great thing about having the IE team blogging however is that there can be dialogue with the community and the best pathway can be illuminated through that dialogue.

The aspects that I feel are wrong about IE8 requiring a meta tag to enter standards mode are :

• The list of things developers need to do to accommodate for IE grows again.
• It feels like we are forced to trade an extra meta tag to get IE to behave.
• The article argues our mothers will have IE8. Maybe our Mums can wait for IE8 until the sites on the web incorrectly accommodating for IE7 are corrected? I implore you - ask your Mum about IE8 tonight - let me know what she says.
• I don’t like documents ‘knowing’ about what renders them.
• Something Mum once said about putting your best foot forward.
• IE9 will require a golden key embedded in your page to unlock its level 23 rendering engine.

The weird thing is I do like versioning things - we use versioning as a safety net - much as its being proposed for IE8. I guess it just doesn’t feel like the web I know. I like the idea of browser companies trying hard to render my site correctly rather than me trying to test and code for all the browsers out there.

I hate reading posts of dissent which don’t provide alternatives so here’s my hastily constructed one; Rename IE and no longer use any trace of that name to identify it.

The existing web with IE specific code only kicks in for IE. The new branded browser from Microsoft ditches the older rendering engines - drops its weight and runs like its a new entrant to the market.

Anyway, I note it here; I disagree.

I used Macs a lot at University and whilst I didn’t completely revile them they certainly weren’t compelling enough to convert me. Price-wise the divide was large and software support was niche at best. Apple has come a long way since then playing an excellent strategic game supporting the progression of the Mac hardware as the ‘every-platform’ through BootCamp and their support ofvirtualization software, Parallels.

For me however the seduction was not one of purely access to a large variety of software - I’d seen the Mac find leading software products in almost every category of software I cared about. For me the issue was the taxing burden that poorly realised user-interfaces on Windows Pcs that wore me down. As time becomes a more precious commodity I found time wasted battling interface which could have been spent doing frustrated me to despair.

A few weeks into owning my new Macbook and I am still amazed at how few battles I’ve had to fight to be productive on it. I am discovering new software to replace my Windows favorites - where it was FeedDemon its now NetNewsWire (I think Newsgator may be able to attribute a portion of sales to the growing numbers of Mac converts); Windows LiveWriter (which I commended the Windows Live team highly on - Mac version please?) is currently surplanted by a trial version of MarsEdit; Firefox has surprisingly been replaced by Safari - I don’t know how long this will last as I am a great fan of the rich set of plugins available for Firefox but for now its probably the lighter information load I am dealing with on the new machine that is making Safari such a pleasure.

On the bang for buck front - I went with the standard MacBook and am glad I did so. For the price of a low to mid-range laptop you get a faster, quieter more pleasant to use machine. For all the tasks I’ve thrown at it I’ve not yet hit anything that has made me need to think about the hardware. And that’s the way it should be.

One final note: having used the Mac’s DVI out for connecting with my telly I think if you have a DVI enabled TV then a MacMini represents incredible value for you.

I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done - test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.

Who reigns supreme?

They all rule the net in their own way. Google’s brand is strongest at the moment and most web searches are conducted there. Yahoo gets more visits overall and dominates most verticals outside search. Microsoft in the form of MSN is ever-present and can never be ignored.

Despite Steve Ballmer’s outbursts, I doubt MS are quite as fearful of Google’s sword-waving as everyone makes out. They are busy becoming a mature business, giving investor’s hard-earned back.

There are still interesting times ahead. What happens when Google’s growth slows? It must slow along with internet growth. That leaves only three options for Google:

• More advertisements
• More relevance and algo-tweaks
• Portalisation

The last point is inevitable because as time moves on the ability for the first two points to keep the growth afloat is reduced. The paradox is that to undertake a true diversification of interests part of Google’s appeal might be reduced. Yahoo can consistently drive traffic from its verticals to new or updated properties. Google, in striving to keep its frontpage simple is hampered in this ability.

But they are putting their chips in line.

Hundreds of verticals with quality features (and slowly growing audiences) are being rolled out by Google. We know none of them are vertical leaders yet but with Google’s strong brand we wonder why? I’d wager the lack of both consistent links between the Google properties and a simple entry point into the key properties from google.com’s frontpage hinder it from sharing the Yahoo Network’s ability to hoist its younger properties into the position of vertical leader.

But Google could make some moves to change this. And they could execute fast. Simple APIs and a focus on scalable infrastructure means they could string their tools and content together in 1000’s of natural ways. Consistency would be almost impossible but if the links are contextual then traffic is likely to flow naturally through its properties.

There are plenty of examples of the cross-polination of Google properties to see - Gmail users seem to be a trial set, gaining access to GTalk and GCalendar with very little effort. But if its so easy for them then why haven’t they done more of this? Why dominate search when they could dominate the world?

Limiting the growth of Gmail and Google Analytics showed off some of the company’s qualities; restraint and focus. The net exploded with the realisation that Google don’t dominate everything. But I think most people missed the point (but then isn’t that always the case? Let’s call that wioota’s Law #1 :)). Google’s traffic is about 80% web search, 20% diversity from this core product. With competitors of the magnitude of Yahoo! and Microsoft, any true deviation from their core business represents more risk than risk aversion.

As the search companies are finding out though, search growth is slowing and soon Google will be forced to force the issue on its new verticals and start serving them up on either the results pages or the frontpage. Either move could achieve one or both of two outcomes:

• Increase the polling of the Google verticals.
• Decrease the usage of Google Search.

And none of this guarantees they could better acquire users or monetise them than Yahoo!

But Google have smart people!

Do you think that the other two multi-billion dollar corporations don’t?

The key to knowing what the game is is in knowing how these companies differ. For those who love to watch Google take on the big boys, think of it like a computer game where Yahoo! is the second end-of-level boss and Microsoft up a level again.

I think plenty of analysis on how Yahoo! builds its verticals into category killers could be done. I’d wager their email is the real key to leveraging the userbase. At just over 2% marketshare Gmail has a long way to go in that area.

All three have proven to be able to move boldy so the future is far from written but what is clear is that the market has a long way to go in understanding how these companies compete. The valuations would be vastly different I suspect.