Tracking the changes to IE 8.0

As someone who spends far more time browsing the internet than he probably should, I've noticed over the past few years other people's taste in food, entertainment, and shopping are becoming eerily closer to my own. Or at least it would appear that way, as the adds that pop up on the web pages I frequent have gotten A LOT better at knowing the things I want to buy, and I've become a lot better (or would it be a lot worse?) at falling for them. Its not that other people are becoming more like me, but rather the companies that are advertising those products and services have gotten much better at figuring out what it is that I want and showing it to me in ways that make me want to buy it. 

This software that tracks people's movement around the internet has become a cause of concern to many people, and Microsoft was well aware of this when they began to design the latest version of their internet browser, Internet Explorer 8. Like any multi-billion dollar tech company should, Microsoft spent a great deal of time trying to balance what they felt their end-users wanted (more internet privacy) with what their shareholders wanted (more revenue from internet advertising click-throughs). These two diametrically opposed views created quite the conundrum for the makers of the world's most popular browser software as it continues to lose market share to Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers. 

In order to chart the best course between the scylla of privacy and charybdis of advertising dollars, Microsoft used a devil's advocate approach to facilitate it's executive's group decision making strategy. To oppose the IE 8 teams' insistence on tighter default privacy controls, they brought in outside presenter's from various internet advertising agencies to voice their concern that not only would it decrease ad revenue in favor of arch rival Google, but would ultimately lead to poorer internet experience for IE 8.0 users. In the end Microsoft decided to allow the tracking blocking software to ship with IE 8.0, but only in a way that users would have to manually turn on at the start of each browser session.

In the end, I think Microsoft made the right decision, not only for its shareholders, but for its IE users as well. Everyone loves free content, but that free content has to be paid for somehow. As internet ads are becoming more and more common place, I would much rather sit through an ad for something I was actually interested in buying, than one my grandmother or the cat lady down the street would.