The visual focus of the page is a carousel of bland stock images. A smiling person on a laptop representing Office, a group of people climbing a mountain to represent Visual Studio. A crass waste of space.
Everything between the carousel and the footer is just filler. Nobody goes to the Microsoft homepage because they want to 'Discover' Windows or Office, or because they want to see some vapid corporate news.
Everything else is just navigation. An enormous amount of redundant navigation. Missed the link to Windows in the header? Don't worry, we put one in the carousel as well. Miss that too? You silly billy, we put one under the 'Discover' heading just for you. Miss that one? You should really get your eyes tested, but in the mean time, we put another link the footer for you.
Compare this to the Apple homepage. No stock images, just one big image of their latest product. A small number of interesting product updates (even if they are of the "A letter to our customers regarding Maps" kind of interesting) and navigation. Done.
About stock images; I really don't have much of an eye for it much, but this http://o7.no/Pte5y2 to me shouts 'cheap'. From the laptop to the pose of the woman. I would expect exactly this pic on the site of my local computer shop, not on the homepage of the largest software maker in the world. This is one of things that looks completely 'off' to me.
I cannot stand stock images in any context... E.g. biotech or pharma web sites with a (usually young, pretty, female) scientist standing over a lab bench. Or the many ones on MS pages (often amusingly with disguised Mac laptops).
If a company doesn't have its own genuine material to feature and its own damn image, just leave it out!
The visual focus of the page is a carousel of bland stock images. A smiling person on a laptop representing Office, a group of people climbing a mountain to represent Visual Studio. A crass waste of space.
Everything between the carousel and the footer is just filler. Nobody goes to the Microsoft homepage because they want to 'Discover' Windows or Office, or because they want to see some vapid corporate news.
Everything else is just navigation. An enormous amount of redundant navigation. Missed the link to Windows in the header? Don't worry, we put one in the carousel as well. Miss that too? You silly billy, we put one under the 'Discover' heading just for you. Miss that one? You should really get your eyes tested, but in the mean time, we put another link the footer for you.
Compare this to the Apple homepage. No stock images, just one big image of their latest product. A small number of interesting product updates (even if they are of the "A letter to our customers regarding Maps" kind of interesting) and navigation. Done.