Try Our Competitor's Products!
Yahoo sent me an email telling me to upgrade to IE 7:
In the new Web 2.0 economy it may be customary to advertise your competitors products but it still strikes me as weird.
Many people outside Australia may be bemused at the "Yahoo!7" moniker. It's certainly one of the clumsiest brand names out there, and beats my previous favourite PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The name is the result of Yahoo! teaming up with the Australian channel 7 TV network for great victory. Or possibly to spite their rivals at NineMSN. I don't know any other country in the world where they do this.
So why are they doing this? My first guess was that the Yahoo audience is predominantly IE and are more likely to upgrade to a new version of IE than switch to Firefox or Opera. Yahoo presumably want people to get more modern browsers and they figure this is the path of least resistance.
I wondered how IE7 could be “Optimised for Yahoo!7”? Because they’ve both got a 7 in their name, perhaps?
But then it struck me: they want people to keep the Yahoo home page. By promoting the IE download they get people to upgrade to a Yahoo-branded copy of IE; with the home page and default search engine set to Yahoo.
All this before IE is pushed out automatically by Windows Update. Clever.
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