What do you think of the new Microsoft homepage?

http://preview.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

It looks awesome. Glad to see AJAX at work. Pretty too.

We’re sorry, but there is no Microsoft.com Web page that matches your entry.

Ooh, javascript errors!

WOW.aspx

It has to be viewed in ie or you will get a page not found; atleast I got one in firefox.

I see one Windows Mobile ad on a blank white page.

Wow, that looks really good, I think it is a great improvement.

Angus Higgins

That looks quite sweet :O

Nice,  the collapse option on the menu at the top right is a bit silly given that nothing on the page fills the space it occupied.

It looks really nice, I'm not too sure about the rigidity (fixed width) of it though, I prefer things to resize with my browser.

Other than that I like it.

Ambition wrote:

http://preview.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

It looks awesome. Glad to see AJAX at work. Pretty too.

Doesn't work in Firefox (they deliberately redirect non-IE users to a 404 page) and the design isn't visualy consistent.

There's different border styles for the same elements, show/hide regions on webpages are stupid except when they improve usability (like show/hiding long lists of blog comments)

The site seems to rely on scripting too, baaad.

This website design clearly is just to take advantage of IE7-specific features, look at the use of PNG graphics that fallback on IE6 (like the shadows), like how they redesigned Microsoft.com when IE4 and 5 came out

big improvement over the current homepage

Well ... I for one think it sucks ... big time. This better be a very early prototype, because the faults in this are tooo many to mention.

Some of the things I think is wrong here (please forward these to the front-end team that is developing this if you know who they are).

1. It is too wide. My sites make use of 1024 px wide, but this is a major corporate site and should be viewable on 800x600 screens. Make it expand to 1024, sure, but not fix it so wide.

2. The three enourmous images on the top of the page completely miss their mark. In all usability studies I have seen, pictures like this normally don't get seen by the average user. The average user has developed "banner blindness" and will think these are advertising banners and ignore them. They add no value to the site anyway.

3. The right "menu" is very strange. You should not combine the search box with the navigation items. The search should be on the top bar of the page, and no magnifying-glass icon, just plain text that says "search". And why make it expand-contract ? How does that add value to the site?

There are soooo many other things to mention ...

UlsterFry wrote:

Nice,  the collapse option on the menu at the top right is a bit silly given that nothing on the page fills the space it occupied.

Ugh. I hate the collapsing menu. It collapses so slowly.
I hate it when animations get in the way of my data. That's why I hate animated flash menus and why I disable all desktop animations whenever I reinstall Windows.

If I want to read something, I want it available immediately, not after some arbitrary amount of time that the designer decided was appropriate.

I hate the ScrollBar on a web page.

Slow, really slow that's what I think of the new homepage.  However I rarely visit microsoft.com itself, I visit places I know, like www.microsoft.com/technet, msdn.com, update.microsoft.com, etc

I think it's....getting there. It's good for a prototype.

It doesn't really look like a corporate site.  Actually, I'm not sure what it is exactly.

Looks really nice.

But:
1. Why do you need those white rectangles on both sides? I mean why not let users with larger screens use their potential?
2. Does not resize correctly - it does not center itself after resizing.
3. I'm using large fonts in Windows and I see overlapped text! 
4. I LOVE simplicity and usefullness and HATE those dumb flashy marketing images/banners/slogans/etc; IMO google.com beats most of the websites hands down. Including this one [sorry].

However from pt 4 you can infer that most likely I'm a little bit different than most microsoft.com visitors. Which may mean that you have actually done a good job