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It looks as though Microsoft has come a cropper again. It's not on the scale of Microsoft Bob, but Microsoft Australia's promotion of the new IE 8 manages to be both way too cute and rude: Ten Grand is Buried Here greets you with, "We've buried $10,000 somewhere on the Internet and if you're the first one to find it, you get to keep it."

What happens next depends on what browser brings you there.

If it's an earlier version of IE, you'll see "But you'll never find it using Internet Explorer 6." Come via Firefox, and you'll see, "But you'll never find it using old Firefox. (So get rid of it or get lost.)... Ditch the browser you're using. If you try to find the $10,000 with Firefox you'll get nowhere." Safari users are greeted with a similar message about "boring Safari." Google Chrome is "tarnished," and Opera is just "that browser, according to Softpedia.

So much for inviting us to try its wonderful new product. The only feature mentioned: "It's the only browser capable of cracking all the clues."

What clues? The ones they'll drop on Twitter. Microsoft also suggests you follow clues at @tengrand_IE8, whose latest Tweet is, "Team up with your friends. You can't be online 24/7 and you don't want to miss any clues. Share the clues. Share the prize."

The bottom of the page backpedals with, "Tell your friends. It's not as stupid as it sounds."

How it works: There's a page you can only view with their new browser (Will Microsoft again make a practice of creating pages that can only be viewed with their product?) and if you're the first to land there, you win the money. It's not that different from placing a big prize in specially marked boxes of cereal to sell cereal. While slamming all other cereal.

Andrea Giammarchi in London rants on behalf of other browsers in the face of "The Smell Of 90s Competition Page": The One With Microsoft Paying Users.

Mozilla Labs' Michael Erlewine, known as Mitcho, posts a response at Ten Grand is Buried There that uses Google Maps. Zoom in and you'll see a crop circle in the shape of the Firefox logo.

At his blog post about the sendup, Ten Grand Is Buried There, commenters try to figure out what technology blocks other browsers from seeing the clues.

In the bad old days, Microsoft deliberately deviated from Web standards so certain pages could only be seen with IE, and used its bundling of the browser and operating system to enforce its nonstandards.

Patrick Finch at Planet Mozilla -- not without bias, but also not without a case, given the European Union's antitrust investigation of Microsoft's bundling practice -- notes (Beyond Ironic),

...there has been an absence of a discussion about what Microsoft's dominance over the browser market at the turn of the century actually meant to the internet.

As we know, websites were being written for Internet Explorer (version 6) . The web was therefore being developed for use with a specific application controlled by a specific vendor, and that vendor had little or no interest in further developing that application (to the point of disbanding the Internet Explorer team). Or to put it another way, didn't the web really start to become exciting once web standards were more widely used?

Now, Microsoft is in something of a bind, as it seeks both to become compatible with and competitive on the web. Internet Explorer 8 tries both to support web standards (their Acid 3 score notwithstanding) and offer backwards compatibility with previous IE versions. And so, if a web page doesn't work in IE8, you are advised to press a "compatibility view" button to see the site rendered differently.

Enter this marketing campaign from Microsoft in Australia, the "Ten Grand Is Buried Here" contest. It involves a series of online clues that one can only view in Internet Explorer. Well, fair dinkum. It's Microsoft's money, it's their campaign. But it gets truly surreal when you read that the latest version of Microsoft's own compatibility list disables the contest for IE8 users, and so contestants in the classily-monikered competition are advised to switch off "Compatibility View" in order to take part.

Some lucky Aussie stands to win a lot of money, and for the rest of the contenstants, well, their prize is that they get to relive the days when the web was fundamentally broken.

Contest rules say, "Entry is open to Australian residents aged 16 years and over only."

The world Tweets contest reactions, readable at Twitt(URL)ly.