I’m certain there are about a million or more reasons why NBC is married to Microsoft for their media platform (MSNBC comes to mind…)  My prediction is more standards compliant sites like yahoo.com will have more 2010 Winter Olympics visitors than nbcolympics.com.

Someone inside the bowels of the NBC organization will immediately grasp the simple fact that Microsoft’s Silverlight is locking out ~20% of all web users because of a buggy Mac Silverlight runtime shipped with buggy  implementations for Firefox and Safari.  That simply drives viewers away.

I think the thing that bugs me the most is the pervasive culture of mediocrity that goes into decision to support a limited number of visitors to what is a huge investment/opportunity for NBC.  The attitude that alienating 20%  of your audience is perfectly okay is bewildering.  I’d think advertisers would feel differently about it, but my gut feeling is that mediocrity is just okay with them too.

The ‘Office Space’ moment that has already occurred was when the list of browser/OS combinations tested was severely limited due to ‘resource constraints.’   ‘ Resource constraint’ being the code words for,  “Do as little work as possible.”  and a workplace culture that aggressively penalizes risk takers.

The next ‘Office Space’ moment will be where Yahoo’s Olympic traffic beating NBC’s Olympic traffic is cast as a win for NBC, advertisers, Moms everywhere, and the U.S. of A.