JC: It's a key priority for the company. I mean fundamentally it is a core platform for people's experiences for when they are using a PC. We want to make sure that Windows users have the best possible platforms available and they can do what they want to do.
Whether its Windows and Windows 7 or IE and IE8, it's all about putting our users right at the centre of what we are trying to do; [we want to ]understand what they are trying to accomplish, and for the overwhelming majority of people technology for technology's sake is not what they want.
We want to make sure it's fun, fast, safe, secure and reliable and those are the key features in that combination. It's coming together and that's really what I think we've done a great job of. We've taken the practical, almost pragmatic view, of asking 'what are you trying to accomplish?' Well let's make sure that we enable you to do that exceptionally well. You are going to have a great experience doing what you wanted to do.
The other thing is really reaching out to the ecosystem to our various partners to make [the new features] part of the experience and we've done a great job in reaching out for accelerators, for WebSlices and making that, one, easily discoverable, two, easy to develop for and three, a rich and intuitive part of the browsing experience.
TR: Obviously getting third-party support for those areas is a key part to their success.
JC: There's lots of talk about add-ons - who's got the most and so on – and I think we've done two things very right in that area. First and foremost we've looked at what people want and optimised that 'in the box'.
Fundamentally when you first launch the browser it does the things you want it to do. From day one - of all the browsers out there - IE8 is the most complete in accomplishing the thing you want to do.
That's very important. I read [something] the other day from Mozilla on the percentage of people who are using their add-ons and it's a small percentage.
So it's an interesting question; it's the core functionality that is going to define the average person's experience That's been an important piece of how we've looked at it.
TR: What's the one message that you would like to give people about IE8 – to pull people back from using Firefox and to make sure that people don't move away from IE?
JC: The key message is that it's the real world browser for how you really operate. It's optimised for your experiences and fundamentally IE8 is something faster, easier and more secure. It's just going to work. It just works – we've used that a few times in other campaigns but that really is what this is about. It's the best browser for how people really use the internet.
