While I can understand some of the concerns here, I'd encourage you to look at where Internet Explorer is now; it's come a long way in the past few years.
IE today offers a brand new experience with many different features. The reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.
Wherever you are, Internet Explorer is the ideal way to play games, catch up on your reading, watch videos, and browse the web, of course. Use fast and fluid Internet Explorer across all your Windows devices—tablet, Windows Phone, and TV with an Xbox with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
This program is really a great way for bloggers and HN commenters to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way. There's also opportunities for fun prizes and rewards through duration of the program.
Well looks like you should get in touch with some group called "Nashi" according to The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/07/hacked-emails-n...
But that's hardly news, given Anonymous unveiled the scam in 2012 already. So why wouldn't Microsoft follow? They get press, you get cash, everybody's happy (well, except users and devs)
I work at a bank (network and maintainace department) I see the case on MOST PC's where a user prefers either Firefox or Google Chrome over IE, it's NOT because the user is aware of the performance issues but they generally assume/gossip that other browsers JUST work better...
I hope this is comedy. If it isn't, give me a break :)
Excuse the vent - I just spent two hours fixing some shit just for IE...
Seriously. I spent a LOT of my time in front of IE and this is the real story:
The built in search determination is awful. Half the time, valid web sites are sent straight to bing. It's worse than Safari and Chrome by miles. The only hope is hit Ctrl+E to force it to search. It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.
Pinnable sites are just bookmarks outside the browser. This isn't really all that useful. I have never seen a person use it, ever.
As for multitasking, it supposedly no longer crashes the entire browser if a tab goes. That is total trash. Many a time have I lost the entire thing after a tab crashed. As for security, the recent unpatched hole for several days says how the privsep implementation DOESN'T work well (mandatory integrity control). It's half arsed at best.
As for Windows Phone, I owned one (Lumia 820 w/ WP8). The IE version is abysmal. It crashes regularly, renders text in crazy sizes randomly all over the place and hardly works at all across the web. Why? Because people don't use it so no one cares about it. Perhaps that isn't Microsoft's problem but even Microsoft's web site doesn't work properly (MSDN subs+Azure management portal) The browsing story on my Moto G is an order of magnitude better than WP ever was for me.
Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for? The XBox is a horrible abomination. Most of the games whinge and moan if you're not plugged into the Internet, even if you want a single player campaign. It's painful. The whole thing is obstructive and painful. The browser on my 360 is slow, unreliable as well and doesn't render half of the sites anywhere near how they should be rendered.
The big one for me really is that Microsoft can't even make their OneDrive versions of Excel work properly with IE11. Half the time (on several different machines) the spreadsheet display gets corrupted around the currently selected cell.
Then we come to the dev story:
1. The entire back end of IE is a shit crock. The dev tools have no idea what is happening on the wire. They have no idea if the HTTP runtime got the file from cache or the wire meaning we have to use proxies. What's the point of it then?
2. The console is useless, even on IE11. Half the time it doesn't work and the code inspector lies a lot about the state of the DOM. The same with the object inspector.
3. The icons and UI is horrible. Until you've been using it for a bit, it's unusable. Try it on a laptop as well - the left bar is unusable. The only hope is undock it from the browser and Alt-Tab. Some idiot thought that the Azure management portal looked cool and lets change everything to make it look like that.
4. The debugger JS regularly crashes the entire browser and doesn't always hit breakpoints.
5. Compatibility mode. This is a royal PITA for us. It has cost us a shit ton of money. First we got told by MS that this thing was Jesus' sandals. Now we have 2000 users with random distribution of forced compatibility view and no way to turn it off. Inevitably that means we now have 2x the number of test cases to execute.
Just no. Seriously. They can go hang. I've had to put up with 15 years of this crap.
Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for?
Since earlier this month, you don't need to pay for an XBox Live Gold subscription to use apps like Hulu+, Youtube, Netflix and IE (!). Although I can't see the point of IE on the XBox.
Funny. As a fan of Microsoft that uses their development tools and happily owns a Windows Phone, the best thing Microsoft could do is create a fork of Chromium and call it Internet Explorer 12. They seriously just need to start over completely. I've read all the advantages of IE11 but Chrome and Firefox just blow it away in speed and lack of hassle. They'd probably go back to 90% browser share if they built in a fork of Chromium to the OS that they didn't modify in any significant way (ex: don't try to make it support ActiveX, just let that technology die).
But this is not the Onion, this is HN and if we let too many parody comment on the top of the discussion, I fear it will become boring. Downvoted the GGP
I fear that if we let complaints about comments, concern about comment quality and long threads going back and forward defending the legitimacy of parody comments in comments, humour, humourless responses and expressions of concern about the complaints dominating the discussion, HN will become boring.
This is the correct attitude. If you disapprove of a comment, down vote it. Dignifying it with a response means one of two things:
1. Your comment is equally worthless, and should be downvoted. Your comment contributes nothing as the original comment contributed nothing. Downvote and move on.
2. Your comment is worthwhile, and therefore, the parent comment is worthwhile as it sparked good conversation and comments.
A comment that complains about a parent comment adds nothing worthwhile to the conversation as a whole. If anything it does nothing more than add clutter.
you guys are right. it was my knee-jerk reaction to a comment i thought was trying to market on microsoft's behalf, and telling how i thought their effort could be improved, but then also not being sure if it was parody or not at the time.
What's really amazing is how lackluster the whole campaign is. IE is a touted as a "new browser", but here are the features they are especially proud of:
1) Full Screen Browsing.
2) Multitasking, which apparently means "Skype while full screen browsing".
3) Reading view, a la the Readability or Clearly plug ins.
4) Pinned sites, which I guess I don't understand, but it looks like Windows 8 tiles.
That's because IE development is typically around 2 years behind the others. So they can only "brag" about stuff others have already had for a while, but try to spin the features as new.
That "Advocate Marketing" company has a list of customers in the slider banner on their website: Target, AT&T, Fossil, Dole Food Company, McDonalds, Bing, Verizon, UnitedWay (non-profit?!), 3M, Anheuser-Busch, The Clorox Company, Walmart, EMC Corporation, Aveda Corporation, Expedia, Windows Phone, Citibank, Purina, Wells Fargo, Snapfish, Clinique, Oral-B, Sara Lee, Haier. (IT companies/brands are italicized.)
There's nothing new under the sun. On several websites i visit it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether or not someone is a paid marketer (giving rise to parodies thereof, and consequently Poe's law).
When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep. Just like Detroit would probably be forced to pay businesses to settle in their town to attract them in the first place.
> When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep.
I equate it to marketing your own product by bashing on the competition. The former, people aren't interested in speaking about your benefits, and in the latter, even you aren't interested in speaking about your benefits.
I doubt it's so much that they need to, but that someone in that large organization authorized it, either not knowing any better, or seeking some short term benefit ignorant of the long term negatives.
I hope now everyone sees the Penny-Arcade reviews in a totally different light, too (and by the way, Gabe has already admitted to getting lots of free stuff from Microsoft).
The problem is that now this is public, any positive review of a Microsoft product will be viewed with suspicion, having the very opposite of the intended effect.
Many have always viewed with suspicion to most positive IE reviews in the past.
I like giving a honest try for IE from time to time, just like the Bing search (as a user and developer), but always it looks like almost on purpose IE team just refuses to fix most of the annoying things.
I believe changing a name might be a good start.
This stuff is true for many things in many businesses. and media is just a piece of the Iceberg. Video Games Magazines/websites have been paid for decades to write positive review and generate awareness for certain games, and I guess most people are aware of it. That's why I usually take with a big grain of salt anything that's written without any clear declaration of conflict of interest (or its absence).
Just a few hours ago I have run into a weird bug in IE 11. I am guessing some cookie values are cached and this is leading to unpredictable behaviour in my app. Seems to disappear when I have the dev tools open or when I clear the browser.
IE8 -> IE9 -> IE10 was fraught with stability issues that didn't go away till I upgraded to 11.
I get it that all browsers have bugs but somehow IE seems to lead the pack.
Unfortunately, IE hasn't fixed its main problem yet, and that problem is the slow upgrade cycle. Until they fix that IE will unavoidably remain the lowest common denominator of all browsers (on average).
I'm sure that by the time IE11 becomes obsolete I'm going to end up dreading the fact that a huge set of missing features will have to be taken into account.
Remember when Google penalized its own Chrome in the search engine? They should do the same with these IE posts now. After all, they apply that rule to everyone else, so why not Microsoft/IE, too?
Downrank the posts and the sites, and ban their Adsense accounts - if Google wants to treat everyone the same way, and not just the little guy.
Wouldn't want that marketing money go to waste, paying people to write about how to successfully upgrade from Windows8 to Windows7 to have a real desktop OS to work with instead of a Frankenstein Hybrid.
Microsoft doesn't deserve a second chance. They went out of their way to destroy Netscape and then allowed IE to languish for years. Microsoft has always been an underachieving bully. Mediocrity is part of their DNA and they simply have no desire (or ability) to make good products consistently.
There is no need to pay for marketing, IE creates jobs, period. Endless hours of web dev goes to fixing stuffs just for IE, that's what distinguish a professional Web developer from template generator. trolling
I thought that was the norm these days... Or maybe I should ask, what major blog doesn't accept payments to write articles about whatever? Thats how the blogging business works.
It's just that Mike Arrington, whose posts on TC have been some good money printers for many startups of the fund he went on creating, likes to bash who is more naïve and less expert than he is at monetizing or rewarding Web contents.
So, yes, he's probably repeating himself somehow, here.
Paying developers to port their apps is completely legitamete. It's a chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to use the platform because there are few apps, but developers don't want to write apps because there are few users. If Microsoft can spend some money to get additional apps in the store it's just a business decision. In my opinion they should have dedicated more money to that program.
This on the other hand is deceptive and I think pretty embarrassing. Completely different scenarios.
It's not quite as slimy as, say, Samsung paying for fake grassroots badmouthing of competing products [1], but it's little different from fake user reviews on Amazon, unless the blogger discloses upfront, in a very visible way, that it's a paid-for post.
Nothing wrong with rewarding developers for porting app to your platform, there is nothing deceptive or otherwise unethical about it.
The $100-per-app bounty was clearly an embarrassment.
What kind of apps did they think to get with this? Some more fart apps? Cause that is about as complex an app as you can get by spending 100 bucks on a developer.
100 bucks gets you between 1 or 2 hours of a freelancers time. There is not really that much that could be done in that time frame.
Either MS was completely naive when setting that bounty or they of course realized that this would just help inflating the total app numbers in the store. Better not mention how many of those are pure crap when boasting about how much the app store has grown in the next press release etc.
IE still represents abut 20% of Browser usage, it's still more than Firefox and a lot more than Safari.
You never know, the new direction MS is taking with regards to openness may bear its fruits. It's going to take a lot for MS to regain its past market shares, but personally, I'd prefer if it stayed around and compete with the other browsers.
At least Chrome is constantly updated, is fast, and most parts of it (certainly the important parts) are open source... If there's going to be a browser monoculture, Chrome seems like the best option at the moment...
It is for money: under an actual contract, invoice and going-rate, etc. From the page referred to[1]:
Compensation
- This will be a sponsored post opportunity and payment will be made out via check.
- Please send an email (...) with the amount you typically charge for sponsored post opportunities.
Payment Process
When your blog post and corresponding social shares are live, please create an invoice (...). Upon receipt of the invoice, you will be paid the agreed amount within 60 days via check.
In the regards to the content itself, the language appropriately Orwellian: no explicit directive to write "positive" posts and plenty of fakey exhortations to "be creative" and "share your viewpoint"; but also a contractual requirement to include "required assets", and mentions of readily packaged, shareable "prepopulated content".
On a side note, I wonder how the disclosure of this particular campaign will affect them and any involved bloggers given Google's notoriously stringent linking policies... Doesn't getting caught posting/soliciting paid links get you a massive Panda penalty?
My bad, I missed that so deleted the parent comment as it made no sense at all. I really hoped that wouldn't be true, that they offered real money that is. I'd be OK with plain stickers..
This is why I like about working in Microsoft's Marketing. They have a lot of money to spend (or waste). It's just fun to experiment different things with huge resources. So why not? I would do the same if I work in IE Marketing anyways. There is nothing bad about it but the ROI is probably low. However, there is always a way to tweak the metrics to say: hey, I ran a successful IE rebrand program or some shet like that. Go Microsoft (Marketing)!! ;-)
IE today offers a brand new experience with many different features. The reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.
Wherever you are, Internet Explorer is the ideal way to play games, catch up on your reading, watch videos, and browse the web, of course. Use fast and fluid Internet Explorer across all your Windows devices—tablet, Windows Phone, and TV with an Xbox with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.
This program is really a great way for bloggers and HN commenters to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way. There's also opportunities for fun prizes and rewards through duration of the program.