Microsoft Office 2010 trailer kills Clippy

Friday, July 10th, 2009

It’s official. Microsoft’s marketing department has relocated to a smoky cafe in Amsterdam and is enjoying the special muffins. The company’s just posted its promo advert for Office 2010 and it’s madder than a hatter in an electric chair.

Filmed by a Michael Bay enthusiast and featuring some gravel-throated voiceover – they’ve turned Office 2010 into a summer action blockbuster. Whatever was cracking in Microsoft’s collective head has now quite obviously snapped to superb effect. Expect explosions, car chases, shouting and the kind of crazy usually reserved for US Michael Jackson fans.

At the heart of this nonsense is the death of Clippy – the rubbish Office assistant who so blighted our lives 10 years back, though our favourite moment arrives at the end of the trailer when the reviewer’s quotes flash up. Bonkers, bonkers, wonderfully bonkers.

Those Internet Explorer 8 ads? They were just the beginning it turns out. Hoorah.

Microsoft goes mad with new IE8 ads

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Whatever the Microsoft marketing department is on over at its Redmond HQ, long may it continue. The company’s just released its latest ads for Internet Explorer 8 and while I’m not a big fan of the browser, I’m a massive fan of these web-only ads.

Obviously inspired by the television series Mad Men the campaign features a wonderfully terrible Dean Cain hamming it up as he eulogises on the browser’s best features. Surreal doesn’t even cover the humour, which is well … odd and clearly straight out of the same camp as those Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads which I loved and everybody else hated because the world is wrong. If anything though, it’s seems clear there’s a renewed confidence within Redmond following those Laptop hunter ads which did so much to sting the cool Apple exterior.

The videos are posted below for your gratification, though we’ll warn you in advance that the O.M.G.I.G.P features projectile vomit. On the bright side, the G.R.I.P.E.S video will teach you where Dean Cain lives. Really. We know… Microsoft, what’s the world coming to.

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How to use Accelerators and visual search in Internet Explorer 8

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

Two of the big new features in IE8 are its Accelerators and visual search facilities. Microsoft, unsurprisingly, claims that both will make a big difference to your browsing habits. But what does it all mean?

Accelerators are the headline act. Think of them as contextual searching: the ability to do a search related to any piece of text on a page. But IE8 doesn’t simply perform the equivalent of copy-and-pasting your highlighted text into Google: you can do plenty more.

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