Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign 524
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.'"
Excelent Microsoft products (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
what a laugh (Score:5, Insightful)
IE is going to have to work damn hard to get rid of that reputation amoungst developers
Just for kicks (Score:5, Insightful)
Compe up with a native Linux/BSD version Microsoft, and then we will talk.
Overrun by business managers... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
The facts from Microsoft's point of view. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Audience is Microsoft employees. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ease of Use" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have absolutely no idea what those things are, or for that matter where in IE8 you can find them.
I don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Customizability... (Score:2, Insightful)
IE8: The only browser with fully-customizable malware!
Get yours at BrowserForTheBetter.com [browserforthebetter.com]!
Did you notice the browsers they used? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Microsoft going the way of Motorola (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two wrongs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lies, Damned Lies, and Advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Two words: Active Directory (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, in a megacorporation or school environment I could see that being a useful feature. The inhabitants of those environments have little choice over their tools and are easy to extort through the neverending licensing/upgrade merry-go-round. Just the sort of vict^H^H^H^Hcustomer that Microsoft is looking for.
For me, I prefer a browser that is actually standards compliant (to the extent possible since the standards are a fast moving target), cross-platform and easier for ME, the end-user, to customize to **MY** liking.
Best,
Re:Sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the right facts.
Re:Overrun by business managers... (Score:1, Insightful)
You have to also consider the business decision to leave IE crippled.
They are intentionally holding IE development back, to CSS 2.1 standard, in order to promote Silverlight as the method to be used for RIA.
I'm happy to see IE use has fallen to 65% worldwide. When it is below 50%, consider Silverlight dead.
Re:"Ease of Use" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can we come up with coherent rebuttals? (Score:1, Insightful)
The beauty of this marketing bullshit like 'managebility', is that nobody knows what it means, and you can't refute something that doesn't anything in the first place.
Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [w3.org], but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases [msdn.com], 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!
Re:But does it run on linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
Re:Sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
How to destroy the meaning of a word. (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:MS. Here's a fact. This says it all... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Two words: Active Directory (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't argue with facts
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Two words: Active Directory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:1, Insightful)
No, MS has an OS-level management feature that works with any application that can be installed via an MSI package, which is openly and publically documented with a free SDK and a free collection of tools. Any application that utilizes this can be automatically deployed or advertised to specific machines or users within the directory based on the organizational unit to which they belong and security groups that would apply. MSI is well over a decade old and well established, but some retards like Mozilla insist on packaging shit together in their own proprietary manner. All of the major installer companies support MSI and a great many of MS and third party tools support working with them, including pushing them out to workstations. MS even has a SourceForge project called WiX which is an XML schema and toolset for building MSI installers.
MS also provides the tools, documentation and SDK for pushing registry keys out to workstations and users based on the same group policy mechanism. All a company needs to do is provide an administrative template which is a text file that describes the registry keys in question and how to prompt the administrator for the input. In this case it is even easier as the template is plain text and can be written entirely in Notepad.
So, no, it's not some backdoor magic by MS and for MS. It is an openly documented and public application/setting deployment mechanism that has been a part of Windows for over a decade. Anyone can use it, and a great many people do. Mozilla has explicitly decided to be stupid and ignore that it exists despite obvious demand, instead relying on their own packaging mechanism. None of this is difficult to implement. My company, which writes financial software for a specific vertical market, made excellent use of it and we can have our software pushed to thousands of machines along with specific settings for every segment of the organization from a single place in a matter of seconds.
Re:It's Too Late, I'm Done with IE (Score:3, Insightful)
if (IE) { send_drive_by_download_of_Firefox_with_IE_deleter } else { display page }
This post is currently modded as Funny, but this should definitely be the strategy of those who care about standards. At least for a while, an attempt to educate the public.
Re:what a laugh (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that for every one of us developers that hates IE, there are 10 more developers who know nothing else and think this Firefox thing is some hippie fad, and are very adamant about it.
That may have been true 10 years ago, but now, I would have a hard time finding a web developer who doesn't take Firefox seriously. Maybe in a large corporate infrastructure where the site is to be used by employees who are not allowed to have any browser other than IE...
Re:Who is the target audience? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Two words: Active Directory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a compromise? ObsessiveMathsFreak can stop calling Microsoft liars on their "Get the Facts" campaign and we can all assume all of Microsoft's facts aren't facts until such time that they offer evidence to support their supposed facts. Until then, we can all complain about how Microsoft is wasting everyone's time.
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:4, Insightful)
I fundamentally disagree with this interpretation. In virtually every claim made on the article page, the statement is quantifiable and objective. On the matters of security, privacy, and web standards objective tests will show that the claims being made are false, and are indeed, lies.
Yet, it makes no difference. In a sense, we have become too accustomed, too inculcated, by the lies thrown at us every day by advertisements, newspapers, press releases and not-a-denial-denials that are throw at us every day by people who profess to be telling the truth. Indeed, it is a far rarer thing to hear a genuinely true claim from a corporation or organisation than it is to hear a lie or gross exaggeration. To obtain the truth, it is necessary to read between the lines and examine the distorted, yet objective, context and come to only a subjective conclusion. But this subjective conclusion can contain more truth than all the objective falsehoods.
Its easy for Microsoft and others to get away with this kind of thing because we live in a culture where such lies are not only permitted, but permitted to stand unopposed. With the increasing sophistication of marketers, PR departments and spin doctors of all kinds, it has become all but impossible for anyone to challenge these packs of lies. The only people who can, the news media, have consciously chosen not to. Indeed, the modern news media is at the forefront of the industry of disinformation, and indeed is often then instrument and chief instigator of its content.
In such an environment, ordinary people must either assume that every message they read is true, or every one is false. May have chosen the latter. A friend of mine recently expressed genuine surprise that a cheaper dishwasher powered he purchased gave inferior results. He assumed, as many do, that messages proclaiming higher quality in more expensive brands were simply lies, and that equal quality could be obtained with cheaper products. He assumed this because most of the time, they are lies.
Such cynicism in the general public explains why so many higher quality brands fail in the face of a glut of cheap, low quality produce from China and elsewhere. People assume that protestations of quality are a lie, and turn to the only metric they can objectively assess with certainty; Price. Western marketing is slowly killing its own products, one lie at a time.
If you live in a culture of lies, then anything subjective, anything at all, becomes totally suspect. "Quality of Goods", "Quality of Service", "Experience", "Loyalty", "Competence", "Leadership", "Trust". All become swamped in doubt. Only objective, bottom-line numbers can be trusted any more. Price, productivity, age, wages, profit/loss. And as companies begin to manipulate those [wikipedia.org], what are we going to be left with in the end?
Re:I got the facts ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost true. They are not pointed at your house, your house just happens to be in the field of view. It is possible that the camera was pointed at your house the very instant the picture was taken, but unlikely.
I don't know where you live, but I'll assume it's true and grant you this one.
Also true, but totally irrelevant. Lots of people drive down my street that neither live there nor are they going to visit me. In fact, people drive down that aren't going to visit anyone on that street. But that's not illegal, nor is it even socially unacceptable.
That's because you choose not to use their service. They provide me with a service. I like knowing what things will should look like from the street view before I arrive. It helps me find things.
This is true. Unfortunately, I think this is probably a type and you meant to write "not doing" instead.
False. They do have business. In fact, they are making a profit on it as you suggest a little later.
They don't need it. The view of your house from the street is not private.
Why would they need to? You aren't doing anything for them. There was no contract that required them to pay you. If anything, your home builder might have a copyright on the design of your home. They might have a case. You on the other hand have no case.
Nice to know, but again, irrelevant.
My community is not open to the public,
So you live in a gated community? How then did the google cam cars get in?
I'm not much of a gambling man.
No, I have two kids.
This is true.
Sure, go ahead and do that. But one car driving down the street is hardly going to be considered an "abundance of inappropriate traffic". Also, street view is not going to cause people to want to drive down your street. Your county already created a map with your street on it, perhaps you can go cry to them.
Anti-Facts (Score:3, Insightful)
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
Take your pick [mozilla.org]. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests. There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
So unless you accept such unofficial an unvetted submissions as proper impartial tests (whilst simultaneously ignoring the legitimacy of addons), and ignore the universally know, documented and lamented inability of IE to render properly coded web pages correctly, the no, IE does "draw even" if a Web standards comparision. THAT is the lie.
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality. IE is less secure, offers less privacy protections and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari, conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
Re:Lies and Lying Liars. (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I always check it. For one, I don't like the bar coming and going. And it's easier to open a new tab, if the tab bar is already there. I really don't like interfaces where parts of it appear/disappear by themselves. Just like anytime I'm stuck using Windows, I'll turn off the "personalized menus". And the hiding of file extensions (never have understood why anyone would find that useful, much less why it's a default).
Discoverability is usually cited as one of the main strengths of GUI over CLI, yet hiding elements (making them harder to discover) is considered an improvement?