This is the second time Microsoft’s advertising has impressed me recently, a few weeks ago I had fun with their “Certified for Windows Vista” campaign site. In particular the staring competition against “the coach” which uses your webcam to detect when you blink (or basically any movement!). Nick dugg the site, it’s well worth a look if you’ve got a webcam.

I wouldn’t have ordinarily noticed this, but earlier today I opened Internet Explorer (*shudders*) and waited for the MSN homepage to load, I thought they’d done a fancy redesign at first; however it’s just an interactive (in a way) advertisement for Office 2007 – for today only.

msn_2

They’ve placed the standard MSN page inside a Word document, and by using the Ribbon and Office’s live preview feature you can make a few changes to the styling of the page.

msn_1

Update – 03/12/2013
You’re looking at an ancient post. The Internet Archive has a copy of Nick’s Digg post. However, the original Microsoft stare down page is unfortunately no longer around.