log

September 17, 2010

The IE logo, the blue e

The IE Blog mar­ket­ing machine spews forth:

We start­ed by think­ing about what the IE8 logo (and pri­or IE logos) mean to our cus­tomers. When we asked cus­tomers what they think of when they see our logo, we heard pro­fes­sion­al, trust­ed, and famil­iar.

Empha­sis not mine.

Adden­dum: some­one posts:

Offtopic snarky com­ment: Remov­ing the progress bar from the sta­tus bar is deranged and crim­i­nal. Please bring it back in the next release. This is why Win­dows XP and IE8 was last good pieces of soft­ware. Microsoft removes fea­tures like a fad. What a com­plete joke IE9 UI is. Trad­ing fea­tures for sake of min­i­mal­ism. Sta­tus bar can be turned on but it does­n’t have the progress bar. I feel like shoot­ing the GUI people.

Exact­ly how I feel about every browser’s des­per­ate attempts to shed every pix­el of inter­face.

Mean­while, inside the arti­cle under the head­ing “Blue e = Inter­net”:

[…] The IE logo is well known as the way to the web. Inter­net cafés around the world use the IE logo on their sig­nage to invite peo­ple in. Some of our team­mates have snapped pho­tos while pass­ing cafés dur­ing their trav­els. The IE logo is right on the front of the build­ings! It’s always fun to see that to many peo­ple, the blue e means the Inter­net.

The empha­sis, this time, is def­i­nite­ly mine.

Some­times I won­der where cor­po­ra­tions like Microsoft get employ­ees so stead­fast­ly blind to the world out­side the cor­po­rate prod­uct line. What kind of thought process gen­uine­ly leads a per­son to believe it’s good to encour­age monop­o­lis­tic con­trol of a mar­ket, espe­cial­ly when his­to­ry not five years gone tells a sto­ry of stag­nat­ed inno­va­tion and crip­pling com­pat­i­bil­i­ty prob­lems? Hav­ing deliv­ered such an appalling sev­en years of stag­na­tion to web devel­op­ers world­wide with IE6, maybe Microsoft should edu­cate their mar­ket­ing depart­ment on that peri­od so that they chose their words wise­ly instead of appear­ing as brain­less cor­po­rate blog­ging automa­ta blind to basic his­to­ry and obliv­i­ous to their tar­get audi­ence’s gen­er­al dis­like of their monop­o­lis­tic tendencies.

tldr;: Don’t post about how great it is that you ran a monop­oly to the peo­ple whose lives were adverse­ly affect­ed by it. Duh.