The Slippery Slope: When Marketing Morphs into Misinformation

I am developing some exciting new features for INTERDUBS. I made the mistake of not testing the code I wrote for 3 days in Internet Explorer. When I check it again I realize that this cock-sucker of a browser just quits. So I had to roll through three days of changes to find out what exactly made this piece of shit simply quit. No warning, no indication. Nothing. Just fucking ended displaying the page. 6 other browsers were fine, and had been during those three days of development. There were no warnings, no hints of something causing a problem. Nothing. Turns out that a simple

made the ‘thing’ puke. This wasn’t the first time that working around Internet Explorer took almost as long as doing the actual work. Internet Explorer is just horrible and bad. Later version might be better. But overall Internet Explorer is a waste of time.

This would not be worth the ramble. It has been like this for a long time. But Microsoft has the audacity to put out a page like
this. Here it feels that IE8 is just awesome. Indeed it is much better than Firefox.

Which is pointing to a bigger problem: Somehow people started to believe that in marketing everything goes. They believe that it is OK to blatantly lie about things. The bigger the better. I don’t know where that comes from. But it is rampant. A competing company to INTERDUBS inflates the client count by roughly 200% on their public site. They don’t deliver the slightest proof for that number. Their web site looks very pretty. But it is still emitting something that is outside of the truth. And somehow that is supposed to be OK.

I think it is a problem. Not so much on their end. I can understand that they try to get away with as much exaggeration than possible. The problem is us: We let an administration get away with getting into a war over weapons of mass destruction. When there were not any, somehow nobody ever cared to follow up on that. So if nobody gets in trouble for sending the country into war for the wrong reasons, what could be so wrong in tripling your client count? What is so wrong on Microsofts end to claim that IE8 is more secure than Firefox? I personally think it is a miss-conception that something really great can be built on skewed facts. Maybe that competitor hopes to reach that claimed count one day and therefor make their lie less wrong. Problem is, that during the process they lost all credibility. Internally and externally.

Truth is a tricky thing. It will show up. Always did, and always will. Everything else is just a detour. Microsoft will learn that too.