Today, Jeffrey Zeldman made a fine post about the lacking support for the PNG file format in Internet Explorer for Windows. He explains it very well (and links to a great demo page – but it won’t work in IE/Win) and links to a petition to encourage Microsoft to fix the situation.
Online petitions don’t work. No one cares. I know – I started a petition last year (embarrassed). Of course, it can’t hurt to sign the petition. I did. But so did “Bill Gates”.
This is an important need of the web development community being expressed by a prominent member of the community. Microsoft needs to respond. However, I expect that they will not. Each little issue like this erodes a little more from Microsoft’s (massive) foundation and will lead people towards alternatives (like the fine Mozilla Firebird browser).
It is good for Zeldman to bring attention to the issue, and a simple “we’re working on it” response from Microsoft would make a big difference in how the company is perceived. However, I expect it would take a call from a “real” reporter to get a quote from them. Let’s hope they surprise me.
Does a petition starter have to include a process for lobbying on behalf of the signers? If there is a “web development community”, it should be able to elect a representative on an issue to poke Bill with a stick every now and then.
I’ve got a note in to Microsoft. I’ll let you know if I get a response.
The simple thing to do would be to flood Microsoft with phone calls and letters. If a company has palpable evidence (phone rings, pieces of paper arriving daily on the topic at hand), if the same information is cc’d to media outlets so that they realize the matter is important, then it may become nessary for the company to respond. Online petitions are a fine idea, but in practice they fail because all of the notes and signatures are on a screen. Move these thousands of notes to hard copy and this will create a broader perception that the issue is important.
I wrote the following email to Microsoft:
and two days later (not bad), I got this reply:
It’s a start.
You are in! Now you just have to cross reference Charissee of Microsoft at home and bug her personally until something gets done or she spills the beans as to who is in the “appropriate Microsoft group”.
I’ve been “escalated”:
“escalated”… that’s a great euphemism for “forwarded”
I am impressed that you’re getting anything beyond an auto-responder at all.
That is an auto responder on a two day delay.
Have you heard anything since?
Nothing new, Brad, no. However, Microsoft has since stated that IE will not be updated until the next version of Windows (2005).