Microsoft Paying Bloggers to Write about Internet Explorer

Microsoft Paying Bloggers to Write about Internet Explorer(uncrunched.com)

113 points by scottrblock 11 years ago | 92 comments

peterkelly 11 years ago |

While I can understand some of the concerns here, I'd encourage you to look at where Internet Explorer is now; it's come a long way in the past few years.

IE today offers a brand new experience with many different features. The reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.

Wherever you are, Internet Explorer is the ideal way to play games, catch up on your reading, watch videos, and browse the web, of course. Use fast and fluid Internet Explorer across all your Windows devices—tablet, Windows Phone, and TV with an Xbox with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

This program is really a great way for bloggers and HN commenters to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way. There's also opportunities for fun prizes and rewards through duration of the program.

taspeotis 11 years ago | |

I'm upvoting you for clever parody. I think [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

testrun 11 years ago | |

Whatever Microsoft is paying you, it is not enough.

sorincos 11 years ago | | |

Seems the way to go nowadays - Putin is also officially paying bloggers to boast about Russia's prowesses.

doxcf434 11 years ago | |

IE is also very useful for installing Chrome.

drdaeman 11 years ago | | |

Not only that, but it also performs extremely well at downloading Firefox.

blueskin_ 11 years ago | | |

Firefox, I think you meant.

pling 11 years ago | |

I hope this is comedy. If it isn't, give me a break :)

Excuse the vent - I just spent two hours fixing some shit just for IE...

Seriously. I spent a LOT of my time in front of IE and this is the real story:

The built in search determination is awful. Half the time, valid web sites are sent straight to bing. It's worse than Safari and Chrome by miles. The only hope is hit Ctrl+E to force it to search. It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Pinnable sites are just bookmarks outside the browser. This isn't really all that useful. I have never seen a person use it, ever.

As for multitasking, it supposedly no longer crashes the entire browser if a tab goes. That is total trash. Many a time have I lost the entire thing after a tab crashed. As for security, the recent unpatched hole for several days says how the privsep implementation DOESN'T work well (mandatory integrity control). It's half arsed at best.

As for Windows Phone, I owned one (Lumia 820 w/ WP8). The IE version is abysmal. It crashes regularly, renders text in crazy sizes randomly all over the place and hardly works at all across the web. Why? Because people don't use it so no one cares about it. Perhaps that isn't Microsoft's problem but even Microsoft's web site doesn't work properly (MSDN subs+Azure management portal) The browsing story on my Moto G is an order of magnitude better than WP ever was for me.

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for? The XBox is a horrible abomination. Most of the games whinge and moan if you're not plugged into the Internet, even if you want a single player campaign. It's painful. The whole thing is obstructive and painful. The browser on my 360 is slow, unreliable as well and doesn't render half of the sites anywhere near how they should be rendered.

The big one for me really is that Microsoft can't even make their OneDrive versions of Excel work properly with IE11. Half the time (on several different machines) the spreadsheet display gets corrupted around the currently selected cell.

Then we come to the dev story:

1. The entire back end of IE is a shit crock. The dev tools have no idea what is happening on the wire. They have no idea if the HTTP runtime got the file from cache or the wire meaning we have to use proxies. What's the point of it then?

2. The console is useless, even on IE11. Half the time it doesn't work and the code inspector lies a lot about the state of the DOM. The same with the object inspector.

3. The icons and UI is horrible. Until you've been using it for a bit, it's unusable. Try it on a laptop as well - the left bar is unusable. The only hope is undock it from the browser and Alt-Tab. Some idiot thought that the Azure management portal looked cool and lets change everything to make it look like that.

4. The debugger JS regularly crashes the entire browser and doesn't always hit breakpoints.

5. Compatibility mode. This is a royal PITA for us. It has cost us a shit ton of money. First we got told by MS that this thing was Jesus' sandals. Now we have 2000 users with random distribution of forced compatibility view and no way to turn it off. Inevitably that means we now have 2x the number of test cases to execute.

Just no. Seriously. They can go hang. I've had to put up with 15 years of this crap.

ern 11 years ago | | |

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for?

Since earlier this month, you don't need to pay for an XBox Live Gold subscription to use apps like Hulu+, Youtube, Netflix and IE (!). Although I can't see the point of IE on the XBox.

GhotiFish 11 years ago | | |

its parody, here's another post of his: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857458

tagrun 11 years ago | | |

Maybe he was paid by Microsoft to defend IE :)

madaxe_again 11 years ago | | |

It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Oi! Don't be hating on lobotomized monkeys! After all, they made a web browser....

btian 11 years ago | |

You forgot #IEbloggers

300bps 11 years ago | |

Funny. As a fan of Microsoft that uses their development tools and happily owns a Windows Phone, the best thing Microsoft could do is create a fork of Chromium and call it Internet Explorer 12. They seriously just need to start over completely. I've read all the advantages of IE11 but Chrome and Firefox just blow it away in speed and lack of hassle. They'd probably go back to 90% browser share if they built in a fork of Chromium to the OS that they didn't modify in any significant way (ex: don't try to make it support ActiveX, just let that technology die).

blueskin_ 11 years ago | |

Oh look, the blogs are leaking.

cokleisli 11 years ago | |

You are paid for advertising IE too.

higherpurpose 11 years ago | |

If it's so good, then they don't need to pay for astro-turfing now? That strategy comes from a position of weakness, not strength.

venomsnake 11 years ago | | |

The OP was sarcastic.

officialjunk 11 years ago | |

At least try to make is sound like a real comment rather than copy and pasted marketing verbiage. Unless this is satire...

m_mueller 11 years ago | | |

You must be one of these people who complain about Onion articles not being truthful.

IvyMike 11 years ago |

What's really amazing is how lackluster the whole campaign is. IE is a touted as a "new browser", but here are the features they are especially proud of:

  1) Full Screen Browsing.
  2) Multitasking, which apparently means "Skype while full screen browsing".
  3) Reading view, a la the Readability or Clearly plug ins.
  4) Pinned sites, which I guess I don't understand, but it looks like Windows 8 tiles.

http://www.rethinkie.com/hello-again/#/newbrowser

Do I qualify for a payment?

higherpurpose 11 years ago | |

That's because IE development is typically around 2 years behind the others. So they can only "brag" about stuff others have already had for a while, but try to spin the features as new.

mkr-hn 11 years ago | | |

It works for Apple.

boobsbr 11 years ago | |

> 1) Full Screen Browsing.

Like pressing F11? IE8 has it...

anonymfus 11 years ago |

That "Advocate Marketing" company has a list of customers in the slider banner on their website: Target, AT&T, Fossil, Dole Food Company, McDonalds, Bing, Verizon, UnitedWay (non-profit?!), 3M, Anheuser-Busch, The Clorox Company, Walmart, EMC Corporation, Aveda Corporation, Expedia, Windows Phone, Citibank, Purina, Wells Fargo, Snapfish, Clinique, Oral-B, Sara Lee, Haier. (IT companies/brands are italicized.)

DanBC 11 years ago | |

It's a nice list for search engine providers.

Perhaps DDG could low-light results that include companies that have paid-blogging programs?

"Caution: the quality of these pages might be low because $CORP pays bloggers to promote them"

JonnieCache 11 years ago | | |

Advocacy tracking/detection/whatever would be a great feature for ddg.

tsurantino 11 years ago |

For reference, here are details about the program:

http://unbouncepages.com/7975010c-edb3-11e3-b3e0-12314000cce...

PStamatiou 11 years ago |

They pitched me as well yesterday: https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/478757246323548162

dasil003 11 years ago |

As long as Microsoft continues improving IE the way they have been I'm not going to get my undies in a bunch over a little astroturfing.

mappu 11 years ago |

There's nothing new under the sun. On several websites i visit it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether or not someone is a paid marketer (giving rise to parodies thereof, and consequently Poe's law).

scottrblock 11 years ago | |

I think the news is that it was sent to Arrington of all people. Plus the "Go TechCrunch" bit.

codezero 11 years ago |

I guess it says a lot about how much Microsoft has improved over the years that this seems "low, even for Microsoft." right?

ekianjo 11 years ago | |

When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep. Just like Detroit would probably be forced to pay businesses to settle in their town to attract them in the first place.

jasonlotito 11 years ago | | |

> When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep.

I equate it to marketing your own product by bashing on the competition. The former, people aren't interested in speaking about your benefits, and in the latter, even you aren't interested in speaking about your benefits.

codezero 11 years ago | | |

I doubt it's so much that they need to, but that someone in that large organization authorized it, either not knowing any better, or seeking some short term benefit ignorant of the long term negatives.

yuhong 11 years ago | |

I wrote a wishlist for Satya sometimes ago on Hal Berenson's blog: http://hal2020.com/2014/03/03/satya-shuffles-his-leadership/...

zacharycohn 11 years ago |

I love the "Go TechCrunch!" line at the end.

higherpurpose 11 years ago |

I hope now everyone sees the Penny-Arcade reviews in a totally different light, too (and by the way, Gabe has already admitted to getting lots of free stuff from Microsoft).

sheltgor 11 years ago | |

It may be the case that he gets paid, but the Surface is at least a legitimately good piece of hardware (much better in its product domain than IE)

benaston 11 years ago |

The problem is that now this is public, any positive review of a Microsoft product will be viewed with suspicion, having the very opposite of the intended effect.

pllbnk 11 years ago | |

Many have always viewed with suspicion to most positive IE reviews in the past. I like giving a honest try for IE from time to time, just like the Bing search (as a user and developer), but always it looks like almost on purpose IE team just refuses to fix most of the annoying things. I believe changing a name might be a good start.

ekianjo 11 years ago |

This stuff is true for many things in many businesses. and media is just a piece of the Iceberg. Video Games Magazines/websites have been paid for decades to write positive review and generate awareness for certain games, and I guess most people are aware of it. That's why I usually take with a big grain of salt anything that's written without any clear declaration of conflict of interest (or its absence).

davyjones 11 years ago |

Just a few hours ago I have run into a weird bug in IE 11. I am guessing some cookie values are cached and this is leading to unpredictable behaviour in my app. Seems to disappear when I have the dev tools open or when I clear the browser.

IE8 -> IE9 -> IE10 was fraught with stability issues that didn't go away till I upgraded to 11.

I get it that all browsers have bugs but somehow IE seems to lead the pack.

sixQuarks 11 years ago | |

No kidding. I also have weird IE bugs on sites that work flawlessly in other older browsers.

spion 11 years ago |

Unfortunately, IE hasn't fixed its main problem yet, and that problem is the slow upgrade cycle. Until they fix that IE will unavoidably remain the lowest common denominator of all browsers (on average).

I'm sure that by the time IE11 becomes obsolete I'm going to end up dreading the fact that a huge set of missing features will have to be taken into account.

higherpurpose 11 years ago |

Remember when Google penalized its own Chrome in the search engine? They should do the same with these IE posts now. After all, they apply that rule to everyone else, so why not Microsoft/IE, too?

Downrank the posts and the sites, and ban their Adsense accounts - if Google wants to treat everyone the same way, and not just the little guy.

shmerl 11 years ago |

Next step in MS evolution would be paying bloggers to write about Windows ;) Though it might still take a while.

yaeger 11 years ago | |

Windows8 to be precise.

Wouldn't want that marketing money go to waste, paying people to write about how to successfully upgrade from Windows8 to Windows7 to have a real desktop OS to work with instead of a Frankenstein Hybrid.

booruguru 11 years ago |

Microsoft doesn't deserve a second chance. They went out of their way to destroy Netscape and then allowed IE to languish for years. Microsoft has always been an underachieving bully. Mediocrity is part of their DNA and they simply have no desire (or ability) to make good products consistently.

WorldWideWayne 11 years ago | |

They don't deserve a second chance at what? Being your friend?

If Netscape had their way you'd be paying for web browsers.

The web is a pit of mediocrity held together by hacks. What browser do you use that isn't mediocre?

baconstrp 11 years ago |

There is no need to pay for marketing, IE creates jobs, period. Endless hours of web dev goes to fixing stuffs just for IE, that's what distinguish a professional Web developer from template generator. trolling

varkson 11 years ago |

Meh, so many companies do this, it's not new or evil.

Paul_S 11 years ago | |

Advertisements masquerading as impartial opinion pieces are not evil? What is evil - strangling kittens?

mkhpalm 11 years ago |

I thought that was the norm these days... Or maybe I should ask, what major blog doesn't accept payments to write articles about whatever? Thats how the blogging business works.

mathnode 11 years ago |

The thing is, it's boring. We don't care! We have had good browsers for years! Too late to the party as always MS.

Yuioup 11 years ago |

Why am I getting a Déjà vu? I've seen the "Go TechCrunch" comment before. This looks like a repost to me.

camillomiller 11 years ago | |

It's just that Mike Arrington, whose posts on TC have been some good money printers for many startups of the fund he went on creating, likes to bash who is more naïve and less expert than he is at monetizing or rewarding Web contents. So, yes, he's probably repeating himself somehow, here.

ycGee 11 years ago |

yeh Microsoft definitly is inspired by Google in this regard... http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-p...

aosmith 11 years ago |

This seems vaguely familiar to me... Remember when they paid to port apps to windows phone?

markkanof 11 years ago | |

Paying developers to port their apps is completely legitamete. It's a chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to use the platform because there are few apps, but developers don't want to write apps because there are few users. If Microsoft can spend some money to get additional apps in the store it's just a business decision. In my opinion they should have dedicated more money to that program.

This on the other hand is deceptive and I think pretty embarrassing. Completely different scenarios.

mercurial 11 years ago | | |

It's not quite as slimy as, say, Samsung paying for fake grassroots badmouthing of competing products [1], but it's little different from fake user reviews on Amazon, unless the blogger discloses upfront, in a very visible way, that it's a paid-for post.

Nothing wrong with rewarding developers for porting app to your platform, there is nothing deceptive or otherwise unethical about it.

1: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-rev...

yaeger 11 years ago | | |

The $100-per-app bounty was clearly an embarrassment.

What kind of apps did they think to get with this? Some more fart apps? Cause that is about as complex an app as you can get by spending 100 bucks on a developer.

100 bucks gets you between 1 or 2 hours of a freelancers time. There is not really that much that could be done in that time frame.

Either MS was completely naive when setting that bounty or they of course realized that this would just help inflating the total app numbers in the store. Better not mention how many of those are pure crap when boasting about how much the app store has grown in the next press release etc.

pje 11 years ago |

> I believe it will be easier for them to pay users to use Internet Explorer.

aikah 11 years ago |

Of course it does,like it is paying astroturfers right here on HN.

nikster 11 years ago |

Wait... I thought the browser wars were over?

Renaud 11 years ago | |

IE still represents abut 20% of Browser usage, it's still more than Firefox and a lot more than Safari.

You never know, the new direction MS is taking with regards to openness may bear its fruits. It's going to take a lot for MS to regain its past market shares, but personally, I'd prefer if it stayed around and compete with the other browsers.

I don't want Chrome to end-up being the new IE.

Mikeb85 11 years ago | | |

At least Chrome is constantly updated, is fast, and most parts of it (certainly the important parts) are open source... If there's going to be a browser monoculture, Chrome seems like the best option at the moment...

WorldWideWayne 11 years ago | | |

Where are you getting your numbers?

IE is at ~60% of desktop browsers and sites that report combined numbers for multiple device types sometimes reduce their desktop numbers.

amaks 11 years ago |

So unsurprising.

dashdot 11 years ago |

I think this is perfectly legit.

Of course as long as they do not instruct you WHAT to write and do not interfere your publishing process in any way at any point.

qhoc 11 years ago |

This is why I like about working in Microsoft's Marketing. They have a lot of money to spend (or waste). It's just fun to experiment different things with huge resources. So why not? I would do the same if I work in IE Marketing anyways. There is nothing bad about it but the ROI is probably low. However, there is always a way to tweak the metrics to say: hey, I ran a successful IE rebrand program or some shet like that. Go Microsoft (Marketing)!! ;-)