Late to the party - Microsoft, vomit and what we really cannot keep calling the browser wars

Hello, and welcome to "Late to the Party", a probably fairly regular event where, having had a nice cup of tea and a bit of a think, I opine about things that nobody else cares about any more. Between tweeting, tumbling, and of course the goth poetry on Dreamwidth (as if there were any other kind), it's nice to be perversely non-immediate.

Seriously. Dreamwidth looks exactly like Livejournal. It's uncanny. Although admittedly it may just be that anime fanfic writers have very consistent design sense.

Not to be distracted by overripe pondering from overripe pondering, I've been marinading Microsoft's latest stab at knocking Apple of, as Sir Alex Ferguson would say, their cherished perk.

As one can probably tell from the HTC Magic happily connecting to wherever I've left my bluetooth headset, I'm fascinated when globally dominant near-monopolists find themselves made blushing ingenues in a particular market. Google's mastery of search is so vast and compelling that being at such a disadvantage in the phone OS market must be... quite thrilling, actually. A little sexy.

Likewise, Microsoft may be the Empire, but there are some things it just can't seem to do. One of these is making a media player that does not immediately remind you of Steven Smith's tattooed upper arm. Another is producing adverts which can efface, even temporarily, the kerb stomp of Long and Hodgman's PC/Mac double act.

It's not a fair comparison, really. Apple is shifting a very specific hardware/software combination, with a very simple value proposition - it works better than Windows running on high-street hardware. Windows is speaking to an audience almost all of whom know their products, use their products and have no expectation that upgrading their product will actually improve their experience.

This has led to some strange rangefinding exercises, such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky's remake of Easy Rider with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld looking for America. Bradley and Montgomery have now taken a tilt at giving Microsoft the quirky, offbeat and unselfconscious image it seems to desire passionately in the face of a complete lack of appropriateness.

(I can relate. In my teens I was convinced that a leather jacket would be the single transformative element that would make me look totally cool. A lot of cowhide went to charity before I could finally admit that it wasn't the jacket, ultimately, that was the problem with the picture.)

Internet Explorer 8 is already a tough sell, since if one is downloading and installing a browser it's probably not going to be Internet Explorer. IE is the browser you start with and the browser you stay with if your browser is not very important to you, but the browser you upgrade to? Tough sell, and one that ultimately comes back to the same issue - do you trust a new Microsoft version to improve your experience? Is the price too great when held against the benefit, even when the price is free?

Cue Bradley and Montgomery, and a series of spots in which Dean Cain identifies problems that people have with their experience of the Internet which Internet Explorer 8 fixes. Integration with social networking sites, rendering speeds, private browsing and so on.

The most striking of these adverts is definitely, and predictably, the one about porn. Short version - woman borrows boyfriend/husband's laptop, finds terrible pornography in the history bar, is copiously sick.

This advert has not, it's fair to say, been universally well received, and was pulled pretty quickly - even more so than Gates-Seinfeld, in fact. However, I rather liked it - if not the presentation, at least the acknowledgement of what people do with their browsers - porn, Facebook, cute animal pictures - and the possible discontents.

(Minor tangent - I remember reading the Saturday Guardian's Family section some months ago, and finding that the cover story - the front page - was about a man who insisted on looking at porn on his family computer despite his wife's fear that their children would then find it. Two pages of broadsheet type because nobody - mother, father, writer or imagined audience - thought to install Stealther. But that would have been a pretty short article, and I digress.)

The startling thing here, surely, is that Internet Explorer 8 is being proposed as the solution when every other browser of any note has been offering some form of incognito mode for a good few iterations. If anything, Microsoft is highlighting that privacy has not been a big deal for Microsoft up until this point. It is a fun angle that really does the client no favours at all.

This is confusing, at least until you see this comparison chart. I suppose it makes sense, for the same reason that the Coca-Cola Corporation offices probably don't have Pepsi in the vending machines, that most PCs in the Microsoft office are running Internet Explorer.

If you have left your Macbook considerately in the agency office and are pitching to that chart, though, it must be tricky to steer the conversation. Presumably if anyone below a certain level of seniority in the meeting mentioned non-IE browsers (especially Firefox 3.5), they were summarily executed. If anyone above that level did so, everyone below them was summarily executed. To prevent rumours, and to encourage a productive working environment. It's probably hard to bring your creative A game to that sort of meeting.