Back in the day, it was news when Google used its massive home page distribution to push its new Chrome browser.
Google putting ads on its home page?! A big deal, even if they were for Google’s own products. It spoke to an ongoing creep inside the company of leveraging its position in search to help it win in other markets, and to some, it felt like a violation of Google’s own principles in the process.
Well, it’d not be fair for me to at least point out that Microsoft is now doing the same thing, using its 11 or so points of share on Bing to push IE 8, its upgraded web browser (see upper right corner)
It’s also notable that as far as I can tell, Microsoft is only showing the promotion to users of Firefox and Chrome. I can’t see the ad on Safari, my native browser, so if a colleague (thanks GB) hadn’t pointed it out, I would have missed it entirely. Wonder why Microsoft is sparing the Safari crowd?
Indications of an Apple/Microsoft detente? The plot thickens…
Detente? Hummm… Having been a personal computer industry observer now for the past, I don’t know, 25 years or longer you’d have to be pretty blinded not to recognize or realize that all these companies – Google,. Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, AOL, Sun, Facebook, Intel, IBM, etc. and on and on – have always been and will always be BOTH competitors and partners. From one day to the next, it would be difficult to define absolute enemies and pretend their are wars and death matches as the speculative commentators would wish in order to add to the sensationalist claims. I worked for a time in software development and we, on practically a day to day basis, had regular telephone conferences and/or meetings with all the major software and hardware manufacturers and with our counterparts in those companies. Many were considered by the outside world to be our dire opponents and fierce competitors for “marketshare” or “mindshare.” But it is way overblown and hyped for reasons not always clear by a tech illiterate crowd standing and watching from the sidelines. Detente? If this is detente between Apple and Microsoft than there have been a million little detentes over the past 20 years.
LOL it shows up on firefox and chrome on Linux as well….
From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx :
“Internet Explorer 8 is available only on PCs running Windows.”
So, why would you invite Safari users?
-danny
That’s interesting, odd and slight creepy.
I can see it on Firefox.