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Comment by watson | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who finds all the happy faces Microsoft have injected into the page a bit weird? It feels like they are trying to sell me some bad news but make me feel happy at the same time.

Don't get me wrong - I think it's a good move to discontinue support for older IE versions... There is just something with all the smiling and laughing faces all over the page that make all my alarms go off

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The fake-grin people in the pictures are nurses and technicians from hospitals still stuck on IE6 because their late 1990s medical imaging ActiveX controls are bug-for-bug compatible with that wonderful piece of software.

Behind their grins are the questions, "what now?" or maybe even "where do I want to go today."

Their IT krewes are wondering, "how am I going to get the CFO to approve an upgrade to the GE medical imaging suite? we've been out of maintenance for 15 years."

And their info security guy is considering seeking asylum in a foreign country.

> And their info security guy

Who? Oh, that guy? We let him go six years ago when we couldn't figure out what he did.

It's okay. He got back into their network and is still being paid. Got a raise last month, even.

The happy faces on the page are front end developers. This is a dream day for them.

Such a relief for front-end people. We'll be finally free of workarounds for IE.

oh, that's what you think..

Microsoft not supporting older IE doesn't mean front-end people won't have to if their sites have users who don't upgrade.

It just means Microsoft can't be bothered to ship patches for those older browsers.

It's a good first step though. This means that websites can start telling users "we don't support this browser because Microsoft doesn't", etc., and they will die off quicker.

Everyone using a browser that doesn't get security patches is basically a walking malware farm. Not supporting them with your site and pushing them to upgrade is the moral high ground.

This. In fact by supporting those browsers on your website, you're in effect complicit in allowing malware to hijack those users' logins.

I'm not so sure; dealing with mobile safari is giving me some awful flashbacks.

Manipulation (aka advertising/PR/marketing) techniques 101. Showing pictures of happy faces makes the audience (not you in particular, but the average reader) have more positive feelings about the announcement. There's no other plausible reason for using a row of random smiley faces as a page separator in an announcement like this.

It makes me distance myself from the brand and distrust it.

Advertising/PR and marketing are not the same thing.

But in this case they overdid it, and now it feels a bit like a scam/domain hijacked website with tons of stock photos. I might not have noticed a single row, but it has 4 rows!

I don't think it's weird at all, and it's probably a deliberate design choice by the developer that made this page. They've probably probably suffered for years because of IE's poor support for standards and other quirks. I think it's a mini celebration by way of design!

Hey, they're probably happy as heck to be free of the enterprise support burden.

Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.

So they are happy that they will get more from their Support partners

Believe it or not, that's a huge improvement compared to Microsoft's past marketing endeavors.

Checkout the photoshopped freaks they used for VS2008 http://www.secretgeek.net/vs2008_bugeye

Haha, oh my god--I remember having taken a screenshot of that guy and shared it with the guys who worked with me.

That's almost comically standard stock image use, I haven't seen this outside of parodies in quite a while!

Reminds me of this picture

http://www.lucasthenomad.com/images/cache/img/5d/5d8664cf92e...

You are not the only one. My immediate thought was, what's up with the dazed-looking Microsoft stock humans.

When I read your comment, I thought they had inserted happy smileys in their text. It made me curious enough to open the page and see the regular marketing faces for Microsoft. That was a bit of a bummer. It would have made my day to see real smileys on that page! ;-)

It's super creepy.

Nah, I take it literally: this announcement makes 28 people happy!! Good for them!

it sounds like you criticizing our stock art photo overlords..

no but seriously those pics are manic

:-)

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