Internet Explorer 7’s $250,000 sweepstake

Well this is one way to keep market share if you have a quarter of a million dollars for a marketing budget. Starting from today, Microsoft is hosting a two month promotion, “The IE7 Shop with More Confidence Sweepstakes” in partnership with PayPal to give 25 lucky users each $10,000 to spend via PayPal.

Sure they could have put that money back into the development of Internet Explorer to make it a more competitive web browser, but that wouldn’t be as fun would it?

The IE7 Shop with More Confidence Sweepstakes

To enter, it is suggested you first watch a ridiculously boring Flash animation before being redirected to the entry page (or just go straight to it), then complete an entry form on the promotion website. However as the name suggests, it is a promotion for Internet Explorer 7 so it makes sense you will need to use it to access the page. If you try to access the page from other browsers, it will first ask you to download and install IE7. Fortunately for Firefox users like myself, IETab gives the best of both worlds in situations like this. Sorry, but I feel even more confident shopping with Firefox. The sweepstake ends on January 31, 2008.

Sometimes I wished Australia could just become the 51st state of the United States just so I can participate in all these sweepstakes. And for a while under the Howard government, that didn’t seem too far off either.

17 insightful thoughts

  1. IE7 with Protected Mode on Vista is still the safest browsing experience you can get short of running everything in a virtual machine. IEtab doesn’t give you that.

  2. “Sometimes I wished Australia could just become the 51st state of the United States […]”
    Dont give Bush any ideas, Long or else you’ll find a Abrams sitting on your lawn tomorrow.
    😛

  3. Puerto Rico has tried to become a state several times but their prodominately spanish speaking population among others things have always kept the discussion in committees.

    As for the 52nd state I would think DC would be closer to being a new state then the Virgin Islands..

  4. Firefox is ok. But from what I’ve heard, IE7 has the extra security features that makes it more secure than Firefox. That’s the story I got from news sources. And no, I’m not talking about previous IE’s, so don’t refer to that.

    Well I use IE7 anyways, but I’m not going for this lame contest. Sounds dumb. And not many sites support PayPal, even if it is the largest internet currency.

  5. Feel more confident shopping with Firefox/EITab that IE7?

    Ummm… IETab is an embedded IE browser object within Firefox… so you ARE shopping with IE7! (unless if it’s on a PC that’s still got IE6 – then that’s what you’re really using when in IETab)

  6. with the extra ie7 security it puts others to shame… and with firefox becoming more and more bloated and memory intensive it just keeps making internet explorer even better.

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