Microsoft pulls porn-and-puke ad

Microsoft seems to have heeded the critics who were less than enthralled with the company's recent Internet Explorer ad that featured a housewife spewing vomit on her husband after she saw the porn he was viewing on his computer. The ad has been pulled from a Microsoft YouTube channel, as well as from a Web site launched for the ad campaign.

As I wrote in my blog, the ad promotes IE 8's porn mode, and goes far beyond bad taste. The ad features a squeaky-clean young married couple sitting at a kitchen table. The wife asks to use the husband's laptop, and when she does, she obviously sees some kind of grotesque porn on the screen, and begins vomiting, first on the floor, and then on her husband.

Even though the ad was pulled from Microsoft's IE 8 YouTube channel, you can still see it in my blog.

The ad has been pulled from the Browser for the Better site as well as from YouTube.

Microsoft says that it pulled the ad because some customers found it offensive. I'm sure that's true. But the entire controversy may well be a setup as a way to generate publicity --- the agency that created the ad and Microsoft may have known from the beginning they were stirring up trouble with the ad, and planned to pull it from the moment the ad was created.