Microsoft Is Getting Desperate Down Under
Microsoft is getting disparate and desperate, offering a chance at $10,0000 if you use their browser for a few weeks and twitter about it. Check out the contest Ten Grand is Buried Here | Microsoft Australia. I think it's funny that they don't have anything legitimate to promote their browser so instead they say "our fastest browser yet" and "old Firefox" even though 3.5 is being release in a couple weeks and 3.0 being released a year ago is and was still faster, more secure/standards compliant, etc. than IE. At any rate, since desperation amuses me, I'm posting a bunch of screencaps too so you can see what the above link shows you if you visit it in different browsers. It's kinda sad seeing a massive corporation reduced to throwing money at user contests(instead of at their own staff to make the product better) and childish insults at the competition. But then again the company made its bones by riffing off the competition and locking in deals with oems. The ideal of which is riffing off the wii to make natal which is great, and then there's the other darker side rearing its head in the online space where they've locked themselves into a corner where all they have is childishness and flailing jabs at the competition. The people have spoken, market share fluctuations are accelerating in their competitors favour. As more demographics cross over the 50% market share line expect to see a lot more money and name calling from them.
Firefox
Safari
Chrome
Opera
I don't think it's gonna have much impact, just like a really ugly chick playing hard to get and then when you turn her down she tells you she'll only date you if you wear a different shirt every day and IF you're willing to do that you have a 1 in 50,000,000 chance of winning some money. Come on. Especially when there's 4 really hot chicks that put out and know what they're doing just around the corner, and soon in the case of Chrome pre-installed everywhere.
If you browse around MSN there are just tons of ads trying to get you to use their services. Silverlight is total shit, one developer I've spoken to really like it, but it's just not viable, and he was a snob, even the implementations used on live msn sites to promote their products have pixelated poorly made graphics and are slow, it just looks really unappealing. But they're pushing it becasue they want to dominate rich media. Never gonna happen. I read somewhere they're now offering free POP access to Hotmail or Windows Live Mail or whatever the hell they're calling it now(how can they build up so much resentment from their users that they have to rebrand all of their products every few months). Previously it only worked in Outlook Express and a few random email programs that had to pay for the right. But that's so behind, I've got Gmail smtp access for free for moths now, and if Gmail wasn't doing it for me anymore I could just export everything, mail-contacts-calendar-documents, to any conceivable format and move, for that reason I and anyone else that uses Google services does so because their services are awesome. My grandfather tried to leave hotmail about a year ago to gmail but had to keep the hotmail calendar cause it's just not worth retyping his entire calendar, so he's locked in and hates them for it, no matter what they call themselves. Just like enabling free pop access they will have to open up their services but it'll be too late. Even if they somehow magically build usefull open tools by the time they're forced to do it, even blind consumers who just use whatever their computer come with will just hate them so much for all the abuse. It looks like they don't understand that most of their users are from the boom from 1999-2003ish who are just locked into their services and are turning against them. They're user base just isn't growing proportionlly to the rate of internet users. And it bleeds into their other businesses. They want to be in home automation with Micorosft surface and walls covered in wallpaper that's really interactive computer screens and project natal. I personally wouldn't get natal just because it's a camera with a dedicated internet connection built by Microsoft a shady manipulating untrustworthy company that sits in your living room constantly pointed at you while you watch tv and react to commercials. You need trust to enter someone's home like that, and trust has to be earned not bought.
