Microsoft promotes their bloatware with bloatware site

Um wow, just wow. What the hell were they thinking.

Microsoft’s new promotional site for MacOffice2008 was launched today (thanks to Daring Fireball for the heads up). Go ahead and visit. All you’ll see is a blank black page with a small footer bar.

“Why is there no content?” you might ask. Well cause the idiots built the entire thing in flash and didn’t bother to include any loading bars. But it worse than that: after the interface finally loads, the first page requires a 4+ MB download and then whenever you click any of the navigation along the top it also has an additional download of 3-11MBs per tab.

It’s the first day and most likely the site is getting slammed, and with those gigantor flash files that’s not a good thing for their poor server. My browser took over 10 minutes to load the damned thing. And now checking back, it’s completely hosed and none of the content is loading. I can’t even look at the pages I’ve seen before because the flash files are too huge for Firefox to bother keeping in it’s cache.

Correction: Oh hey that download crapout might actually my connection here at work. They recently lamely started throttling youtube traffic, and I just realized that it probably actually applies to all large flash files. As a result, the macoffice site doesn’t load for me. This doesn’t change the fact that an all flash informational site this size is still stupid.

It’s the worst example of a bloated Flash site I’ve ever seen. I can’t get exact figures since I can’t even reach it at the moment, but I’m guessing it all total it’s at least 50MBs — the size of a small application or an HD movie trailer.