440225 - Why Microsoft sends "congratulation" cakes to Mozilla.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Marketing :: General, task)

Description

[Martin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061712 Fedora/3.0-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008061712 Fedora/3.0-1.fc9 Firefox/3.0

Please understand why MS sends the cakes!

The cakes doesn't mention Firefox or Mozilla in any way, but very clearly IE. Hence, MS sends the cakes not to congratulate Mozilla, but to get Mozilla to advertise for IE.

Very clever move by MS to have their competitor advertise for them!

Please only allow cookies if they are addressed to Firefox or Mozilla in the future.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Martin]

Here is a link that shows the cakes.

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/06/sweet-plugin-microsoft-cake-20-for-firefox-3/

Comment 2

[Steve England [:stevee]]

the cake is a lie

Comment 3

[Dave Garrett]

Let them eat cake!

--> Confirmed

Comment 4

[Simon Howes]

You have a point.

The IE brand makes it onto an awful lot of Firefox 3 news articles, example;

/. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/217205


Boo-hiss!

Cake looks nice though, care to send me some here in the UK?

Comment 5

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Clearly Marketing needs to get out in front of QA when cakes come calling.

Comment 6

[chris hofmann]

Look at this way.   There would be no IE team if not for Firefox.  In fact the IE team was cut back to skeleton crew before Firefox came along.   Every great Firefox release mean continued, and more maybe even more, browser jobs in redmond!  Of course the IE team loves us ;-)

Comment 7

[Paul Kim]

Resolving; as per comment #6, IE team WORKSFORME (and everyone else at Mozilla). 

For the humor impaired, ITSAJOKESON.

Comment 8

[Martin]

To comment #7

What do you mean by it is a joke?

Is the cake sent from Mozilla to Mozilla pretending to be from MS?

Comment 9

[Simon Howes]

No, even though one company may be known to be owned by the "axis of evil", the Microsoft developers are still normal, very good people.  

Both companies dev teams are friendly to each other, and some used to work with each other in the past projects.  The cake was sent as a gift to say well done to the Moz team.  I'm sure Mozilla will say well done to the IE team when IE8 launches.  

This bug is seen as light humoured, please anyone understand this if you do not!

I still want some cake.

Comment 10

[Martin]

I am glad to hear, that there is a good relationship with the IE developers, but you haven't unproven my clame.

I don't think it would be too much to ask of the IE team to mention Mozilla or Firefox on the cake.

It doesn't seam very friendly to me to congratulate someone with a cake addressed to one self.

Wouldn't you have been more happy to see a Firefox cake instead taken in consideration that you work at Mozilla?

Something like this could be written to the IE team:

"Thanks for the cakes, but please mention either Mozilla or Firefox on future cakes. It's a PR thing, hope you'll understand."

Comment 11

[Dave Garrett]

Don't take all this too seriously.

Mozilla should just counter and send them a pile of Firefox logo cookies when IE8 comes out.  :p

Comment 12

[Martin]

In that case, please have it delivered by a person wearing a penguin suite together with the recipe and the ingredients.

You know, in case they like it, and want to build them again =)

Comment 13

[Simon Howes]

Maybe we should send Gavin dressed as a robot, we like robots.