DOAKS

You think the title of this post is complicated? Wait til you meet me in person….

The Palin and Obama drama reminds me of the latest browser wars. Here’s how: for the past few years, Firefox has been the darling of the browser world. Mozilla has about 20% of market share. Forget about the fact that IE has more than 70% of internet users. It’s more about the “who”. Firefox is often preferred by the tech savvy/the younger generation/the influencers. Microsoft is aware of this. And they’re not standing still…in a Microsoft sort of way. Which means, to the naked eye, they aren’t doing much.

Even to the fully-clothed eye, the question remains; can Microsoft ever be cool again.

Last week, out of nowhere, Internet Explorer was cool again. Version 8 of IE offered a neat feature, dubbed the porn mode. More here. Basically, a feature that allows you to customize the history of your browsing. Not only was this a good idea, it’s also sort of counter-Google, since Google wants to know everything about your web browsing habits. Especially after acquiring Double Click.

It was working. Microsoft was cool again. For a few days. I changed my Facebook status to “How Microsoft got its groove back”.

The honeymoon was short lived. Over the weekend, word “leaked” that Google was launching their own browser called Chrome. Google hopes to challenge IE and Microsoft. End of the IE 8 story. Everyone jumped on the Google browser. Google products get people excited. Microsoft products do not.

And this my friends reminded me of the Palin/Obama saga. Last week, the Obama team got a ton of press. The DNC wasn’t a failure of disunity, which means that it was a success for the Democrats. Then on Friday, team McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be VP. The media charged. McCain/Palin ruled the discussion for a few days.

That honeymoon was also cut short. News of Palin’s daughter has once again put a damper on the McCain PR party. And the Republicans are pining for the days when press was a scarcity.

P.S. For fun, I created a browser war website, IE versus Firefox. It needs updating ASAP!.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 8:15 pm and is filed under Barack Obama, John McCain, sarah palin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.