Buzzing around Twitter today was a link to a Microsoft competition where users of Internet Explorer 8 have the chance of winning $10,000. What you have to do is follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter, watch out for the clues to uncover the location of the prize somewhere on the internet. Sounds like a fun challenge, but what’s in it for Microsoft?
IE8 has been out now for a short period and believe is now part of Windows update. The amount of IE8 users should now increase dramatically as users update. To coincide with this launch, Microsoft are tangling a carrot at users of other browsers with the aim of converting them to IE8. $10,000 is a very tempting but requires IE8 to participate. They follow up this tasty carrot by saying:
But you’ll never find it using old Firefox (so get rid of it, or get lost.)
A lawsuit in the happening?
To me this seems like anti-competitive behaviour. Microsoft got fined £680.9m in May 2008 by the European Commission and previously £194m in 2006 for a similar act. This isn’t in the same relms, but it’s still targetting it’s competitor Firefox with a monetory bribe.
The concept
Stripped down, this is a clever viral campaign. It engages both non-IE8 users and the ever growing Twitter community for a period of time. Personally I don’t have the time to digest it, but I’m sure others will embrace it.
Will you be taking part?
June 19th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Bullish and vulgar, it paints a disgusting tint on their developers hard work, and undermines their efforts.
It seems to me that Microsoft has lost faith in it’s developers of producing a browser that can compete on merit alone, despite it’s natural advantages.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
I won’t be bothering, or entering, but if you *did* want to join in, you can download User Agent Switcher for Firefox, and add the following as a user agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0)
Then you can masquerade as IE8 and join in, all while using Firefox.