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I was doing my daily check up on Google Analytics today (which is the best web analytics package I've ever used) and I noticed that I had 3 visits from the network location of "microsoft corp". Having peaked my interest I then moved my time frame back to about March 2008 when my website started getting a more significant amount of traffic. I then picked up another 27 visits from the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington.
After viewing what pages the employees viewed, I then proceeded to see what sort of setup they were providing their employees over there at Redmond. To my surprise 7 visitors were using Firefox and 1 was using Safari. Safari? I asked myself with a puzzled look on my face.
Notice those 7 visits with Firefox, the competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer? Apparently they don't mind their employees using Firefox. I might expect them to use Firefox to test their products out in (like they even do that...See: Live Image Search which used to suck in Firefox) but to visit my small time website with Firefox or Safari would insinuate that it's the user's primary browser of choice.
What about that single user of Safari? Well I decided to open up the operating system report and lo and behold, there's an employee at Microsoft using a Macintosh. I can understand someone using Firefox but for a Microsoft employee to be using a Mac downright defeats all logic. One would think that if Windows Vista/XP were the end all be all operating system that they wouldn't "need no stinkn'" Macs. Being a loyal MS corporate stooge I was a bit offended to see Macintosh show up in my operating system report.
Another interesting tidbit I got from Google Analytics (I'm assuming here) is that members of the Internet Explorer Team Blog actually visit their users websites via their blog. I posted a comment in on the IE Team blog stating that IE8 does a terrible job at rendering my website and that it looks worse in IE8 than it did in prior versions of IE. We can see in the report below that 2 employees, presumibly from the IE Team, read my comment and visited my website, neat!
Aren't web analytics great? Perhaps I'll do a simliar study on Apple Inc. employees visiting my website at another time to see if we can find any of them using Windows XP or Yahoo! employees searching with Google Search.
...for a Microsoft employee to be using a Mac downright defeats all logic.
Good point Andy! Personally I don't think Microsoft should even be wasting their time on Mac products, especially when they have enough problems with their own products. If anything having a version of Office for Mac only enables more people to switch to Mac which hurts sales for Microsoft's bread and butter operating system.
As a former MS employee, I do recall others using Mac in the Mac Business unit to surf, while testing Microsoft products; sometimes they "go astray" but nothing too serious. That's only a few dozen people out of tens of thousands worldwide.
