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Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign
ko9 writes that Microsoft has re-launched its "'Get the facts' campaign, in an attempt to promote Internet Explorer 8. It contains a chart that compares IE8 to Firefox and Chrome. Needless to say, IE8 comes out as the clear winner, with MS suggesting it is the only browser to provide features like 'privacy,' 'security,' 'reliability.' It even claims to have Firefox beat in 'customizability.'"
I love my Microsoft keyboard. I love my Microsoft mouse.
I loved their Z-80 Softcard on my Apple II.
It's too bad they insist on making second-rate software. Their hardware is excelent.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
web standards? no browser has given me more greif by completely changing the layout of a page which every other common browsr in every common OS displays perfectly fine. Not to mention all the 'made for IE' pages that look like shit in every other browser.
IE is going to have to work damn hard to get rid of that reputation amoungst developers
I clicked the "Download Now" button, and I can't find my operating system in there.
Compe up with a native Linux/BSD version Microsoft, and then we will talk.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
No doubt MS is overrun by business managers, which I am sure is most of their problems. To a business person, the product is the after thought, but the marketing is the most important thing. IE does not have problems because of poor marketing. It has problems because of of countless security issues with the code itself that have in the past left machines very vulnerable to malicious attempts. Any technology person can tell you this, but I bet this will not be presented as a "fact" on their marketing campaign...
They're using the definition of fact that says: "fact : a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument or inference "
The catch is, it's biased people at MS who "accept it as true" on the "basis for [inherently flawwed] argument or inference"
Microsoft is becoming infamous for these bogus get the "facts" campaigns, which are really marketing attempts to use Microsoft's truth to distort common belief, replacing the facts with MS' contrived point of view.
Looks like this campaign is not even aimed at the market. Microsoft announced a lay off. It appears they are not culling the employees by performance and competence. They seem to be lopping off whole programs and letting everyone go in those programs and all the lucky ones who happen to be in the rest will continue employment en masse. This leads to low employee morale as the IE team people go, "my job depends not on my performannce but the kind of contacts my manager has with the higher ups and how well my team's output is doing in the marketplace. IE is steadily losing marketshare. Europe is going to unbundle IE and there will be a push to get IE less Windows in USA too. What is going to happen to my job? Should I bail out?". So the IE Team VP gets the higher ups to show some signs that his reportees will not be left high and dry. Just a product of internal turf war, empire building and palace intrigue within that large bureaucracy. Nothing much to see here. Move along.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I have absolutely no idea what those things are, or for that matter where in IE8 you can find them.
Fact: Internet Exploiter is PART OF THE USER INTERFACE of every windows operating system since 95.
Fact: You can't uninstall IE without effecting your core operating system functionality. (Windows updates, programs that use IE's rendering engine for their own user interface - antivirus software, I'm looking at you!)
Fact: A VAST majority of Windows users have automatic updates enabled by default and will receive IE8 whether they like it or not (and they probably won't care anyway, as most users couldn't even tell you what version of IE they're running in the first place.)
Fact: Internet Exploiter has nearly always been, is currently and will always be the most used browser on Windows platforms. Yes, suck it up FF/O/Etc fans. We will gain market share, but when you're aftermarket and not OEM, people generally don't care. How many people change the stereo in their car? Sure. You can get an awesome stereo to replace the factory one, but if the factory one functions correctly and lets you listen to music, then why change?
I have worked in IT for over 10 years in the frontline. I'm tech support at a retail store, so my customers are the general public. We load FF on every PC that comes in and encourage our customers to use it. We load IE8 on every clean install of Windows we do because, and here's a really important point, that's the only safe time to upgrade IE without having the OS get screwed over. When IE8 first became a "Critical Windows update" and customers were installing it, we were inundated with fxxked computers that lost network connectivity, or crashed, or ran dog slow.
Hell, I recommend customers use OpenOfficeOrg instead of forking money out for Office.
And you can blabber on about developers. I do some web developing myself and I adhere to the W3C standards - NOT Microsoft standards. But the END USER doesn't care. If the page works fine, then whoopedy-doo! If they run FF/O/etc and the page doesn't work, where do they go? Do they send emails to the website? Do they complain to the W3C? Do they send mail to Firefox? No. They click the shiny (e) icon and try it there. Then what? Most users will continue their browsing experience in IE. Why switch back and forth between 2 browsers? End users see that as redundant.
This may be a little off-topic, but how about an "Only works with IE" blacklist website where IExclusive (hehe, I just came up with that LOL) websites are NAMED AND SHAMED. Then promote the shit out of the site. Maybe developers who cater only to Microsoft's needs would think twice about firing up Fro... Front.... Frontpa.... damnit, I can't say it.
Apple Safari v3
Google Chrome 1.0.154
Microsoft Internet Explorer v8 (RC1)
Microsoft Internet Explorer v7
Mozilla Firefox v3.07
Opera 9.64
So they compare a Release Candidate vs "older browsers"?
Safari is at version 4 as a regular release, not sure about any beta's or RC's...
I'm using Chrome 2.0.172.31 right now to post this
Firefox is at 3.5 for a Beta (Or RC by now..)
Opera is at 10 for a Beta
They should have done apples to apples. When the IE8 RC was out, so was pre-releases of FF 3.5, Opera 10, as well as Safari and Chrome in more updated versions than they used.
Like you, I disagree with these "comparison charts" which let the marketing people cherry pick what options they want to show and completely hide all others. However, an important difference lies between the way these two charts are set up. The items on the chart at Mozilla are actually things that the browsers have or do not have (boolean values if you will), and therefore at least the checkmark is appropriate. On the Microsoft chart, they use the same checkmark system for things that are not 'true' or 'false' at all, like "Security" and "Privacy". They use this to suggests not only that IE is better at these fields, but that the others do not have this feature at all. It's a subtle difference that is very important to how people read the chart.
As lame as this clearly is, I can't really fault Microsoft entirely; I think this is just a product of the deteriorating state of advertising and marketing in general.
Time was, you only had to take an advertiser's claims with one grain of salt, but in the last few decades it seems like there's been a kind of hyper-inflation; now, you can't even read an advertisement critically to filter the hyperbole and extract some useful information, because there isn't any left. After years of being unabashedly lied to by advertisers, we now have no choice but to assume that all advertising is pure, unadulterated lies.
It's a little sad; it only took a few companies abusing the consumers' trust to ruin it for everyone.
Unfortunately, our corporation has mandated IE6. Sometimes its about managerial stubbornness, not user awareness.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Or the right facts.
The story is, quite simply, that it is appallingly easy of companies to shamelessly and flagrantly lie, to produce the most obvious falsehoods, and for absolutely no one whatsoever to bother stating the obvious fact; that they are appalling liars.
It's not even deceptive wording, or qualified phrases we're talking about here. Most companies and organisations just come right out an lie nowadays. Some choice selections from the article. Note that the tick marks in the article next to browsers are replaced by stars here.
A lie.
A falsehood.
A barefaced, shameless, utterly false lie. For you see, there is no W3C CSS 2.1 test suite. There is a Pre-Alpha CSS 2.1 Test Suite, but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases, or at least that was the case last August 18th.
Perhaps some would argue that these are merely exaggerations or omissions, not lies. I beg to differ. Taking these statements as truths would lead one to believe that IE has less exploits, less chance of exposing private data and a higher or equal chance of rendering web pages correctly that either Firefox or Chrome. All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
Some will believe them, but even sadder, more will not accept them as lies.
P.S.
My reply text is being squashed into a 25 character wide column to the right of a mass of grey. It would be great if Slashdot rendered properly these days.
P.P.S.
Perhaps I'll try it in IE8!
May the Maths Be with you!
Running IE on Linux is like rubbing tainted semen on the outside of a condom. You're doing it wrong!
And not even the facts they present are right.
What's more worrying is that the people they provide this campaign to aren't the most technically competent people, but rather people in management positions that are liable to trust whatever they get sent to them, especially from Microsoft.
Like the Accelerators - I don't even want them. It's Clippy all over again!
As for developer tools - the visual studio tools doesn't help much, sometimes you need to analyze the end result in the web browser, and Firefox with Firebug will help a lot. And the source view in Firefox is a lot better since it's color-coded.
"but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8" - But not Adblock Plus, which is the one I REALLY like. There are some fixes allowing a limping adblock plugin in IE, but not completely. And I don't want a browser that is fully loaded with all potential customizations that's out there, I want to have it under control and not bloated!
Performance - what fact is that, they are just buzzing. Most of the performance issues we see are often the network itself or stupid servers. And IE is really crappy to inform the user of the transfer progress.
The privacy features - I can't say that I feel any privacy when using IE, I feel that I have the least privacy when using that browser since it is the most targeted browser and also the browser which allows me the least control.
And finally - they aren't comparing with Opera. Probably because they won't dare to do it!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
fact (plural facts)
1. An honest observation.
2. Something actual as opposed to invented.
In this story, the Gettysburg Address is a fact, but the rest is fiction.
3. Something which has become real.
The promise of television became a fact in the 1920s.
4. Something concrete used as a basis for further interpretation.
Let's look at the facts of the case before deciding.
5. An objective consensus on a fundamental reality that has been agreed upon by a substantial number of people.
There is no doubting the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun.
6. Information about a particular subject.
The facts about space travel.
Microsoft adds this to the list:
7. Something Microsoft pulls out of their asses.
"Get the facts".
They have given bogus 'facts' about their software offerings with regards to Linux, and now to Firefox. Do they think we're idiots? Are they really that scared about competition? That they need to resort to outright lying? How can you build a trust-relationship with them, if you can't trust them when they come out with 'facts'? What happened to ethics?
80 CC D8 AF AE D3 AB 54 B7 2E CE 67 C7
No, a third party has an MSI of Firefox. Mozilla still hasn't stepped up to the plate.
Isn't that the strength of open source? It's done, even if it's not done by Mozilla.
The problem with that idea is that I want to get the MSI directly from Mozilla if I'm going to put my ass on the line and deploy it to all of the machine I manage. I don't want to get it from some other website that may well go under at some point.
"The developer tools in IE8 are pretty decent, certainly far better than what comes with Mozilla Firefox by default."
Why on this or any other earth would you include developer tools in a browser by default?
Most of the people who use your browser will never, ever use these tools. Those who need them can download when. if the need them.
Extra crap pasted onto your browser just adds another potential exploit, and slows things down.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?