Microsoft's Lack of Taste

STEVE Jobs once famously said in a 1996 interview, "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste."

If the Redmond company's tacky, half-baked software weren't proof enough, take a look at their current ad campaign for Internet Explorer 8. This is a still from one of the promotional videos:


In case it's unclear what's happening here, this woman has just vomited in graphic detail. Three times, in fact. Apparently because her husband didn't use IE8's new private browsing feature -- something which, I should note, has been in Safari for about two years, and already exists in Google's Chrome and the new version of Firefox.

Viral videos are all well and good, but I don't think they're supposed to leave you feeling as if you've actually caught a virus. If the sight of someone hurling realistic greenish-brown chunks (and then someone else slipping in it) is right up your alley, you can see the video in full here on YouTube. (Someone who's quite at home staring at puke strikes me as about right for the average Windows user.) I've watched it once out of morbid curiosity, and it didn't leave me amused or convinced of Internet Explorer's superiority. Rather, it left me convinced that Jobs had their number all those years ago.