The real story is their ability to condense the page down to just the essentials which was achieved by concentrating the decision power to a small, capable team, as opposed to a committee of stakeholders. Microsoft has more teams than most other companies who would all like to see their project featured on the homepage. It also has to serve a diverse set of customers who want to buy or need support for any one of their dozens of products. Next time I need to download a Windows driver or skype I'll start my search at Microsoft.com instead of Google.
Hilariously, the very first link, "Sharing your world is easy with Skype", takes me to the home page of Skype.
When you search for "Skype" on Google, to expect the "Play" link to let you play with it or do you actually look through the results to find something?
Interesting. I'm curious, what websites do you use that would've trained the response to simply click on a downloads link instead of looking through the results of said search? I don't have the same response and I'm honestly wondering where that expectation would have come from. When I saw the All Microsoft, Downloads, Support, Communities links I didn't have any expectation that those were suddenly related to my search term. I wonder if it is because they are below the search box instead of above them?
Are you really saying that Skype shouldn't be in the section of MS' "Search" page called "Downloads" when I search for Skype? What is the purpose of "Downloads" then? Guess what, when I click the support button after I've searched for Skype, I expect to find support-related article about Skype, too.
It is no different than expecting to see images of my search term when I click on "images" at Google.
Regardless of your expectation, the fact is that they are related to the search term. Clicking "Downloads" after searching for "skype" takes me to this URL:
Searching on Google and then clicking some items in the horizontal list at the top of the page (Maps/Images/etc) switches to the corresponding search.
Although to me, the "63,100 results" indicates that "All Microsoft" is a search category. The items next to it (Downloads...) use the same font so they look like alternate categories.
Microsoft's website is a solid improvement, and glad they are spearheading the responsive design movement amongst corporates.
But when it comes to their stated goals of simplification, it may seem odd that MS continue to promote unwieldy URLs.
Is /default.aspx really necessary? Would the average visitor care about the underlying technology?
This seems unlikely to be a simple oversight, but perhaps it's intended to advertise the .NET brand (at the cost of usability), or maybe legacy reasons.
