Computerworld.com has a blog article about the first ad in a new Microsoft campaign. The message is, “Buy Microsoft products, because they will run on cheap hardware.” The article is critical of the ad, and this made me want to see it for myself, so I clicked through a couple of links to get to Microsoft’s ad site, where I was offered a play button to show the ad.
Click play; then FAIL.
Microsoft used Silverlight instead of Flash to deploy this ad on the web. There’s no Silverlight plugin for Firefox on Linux. The open source Moonlight plugin is not available for 64-bit unless you’re running SUSE. Therefore I can’t watch the ad.
Way to go, Microsoft. Put out an ad to convince people to buy your products, and lock out Linux users – arguably the people you’d most like to persuade.
Inadvertently they have made a point about Microsoft proprietary standards. Here I was, actually wanting to view their marketing materials, and they made it impossible because they are trying to impose a new proprietary standard where a perfectly good one (Flash) already exists. It turned into an excellent lesson on why not to buy Microsoft products.
Nice work, guys.
Fail! but in an awesome way.
Except for the fact that moonlight has been available on any 64-bit distro since day one, and provides a simple xpi to install itself.
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/moonlight-plugin-mozilla
Waa, only packaged for 11 arches :’(
Although I’m confused as to which site you’re moaning about specifically. Computerworld uses embedded Youtube (Flash), the official “I’m A PC” site uses Flash…
I guess I should have been clearer.
Once the video fails to play, it directs you to links to obtain the plugin. If you follow those links, you wind up at Novell and are offered plugins for 32-bit in various distros, or plugins for 64-bit SUSE, and that’s it.
Hey, I found this post while searching for help with fixing Microsoft Silverlight. I have recently switched browsers from Safari to Microsoft IE 6. Now I seem to have a issue with loading websites that use Microsoft Silverlight. Every time I go on a site that needs Microsoft Silverlight, the site does not load and I get a “npctrl.dll” error. I cannot seem to find out how to fix it. Any help getting Microsoft Silverlight to work is greatly appreciated! Thanks