Before Microsoft spent its days seeking Yahoo’s hand in cold, calculated marriage, the company was occupied with other things. Like building - and patching - Windows Vista. And working on a really, really expensive and mostly-unnecessary touch-sensitive tabletop.
[img src="http://i27.tinypic.com/2qjabv8.gif" caption="" credit="" alt=""]The company was also operating an adjunct program atop its Live Messenger and Live Hotmail services, meant to help a list of 10 organizations - American Red Cross, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, National AIDS Fund, The Humane Society of the United States, NineMillion.org, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Sierra Club, Unicef, Stopglobalwarming.org, and Susan G. Komen For The Cure - devoted to social, health, and environmental causes. The project began in March 2007. They called it, very simply: i’m.
The idea was equally basic. Microsoft would pledge to devote a portion of advertising revenue garnered from each message sent by users who chose to join the effort. In order to grow exposure to 'i'm', the company sponsored the MTVu program “Cause Effect."
Now word is being delivered by Microsoft that they have logged over $1.4 million to be distributed in ten allotments to the abovementioned organizations as a result of a great many emails and instant messages sent by participants in the public sphere. Microsoft claims to have procured “more than 20 million downloads of Windows Live Messenger...attributed to the ‘i’m’ campaign.” If one is to consider the possibility that a significant portion of those downloads may be new users of Microsoft’s chat client, the company could very well have come out ahead financially as far as extending its membership pool by several million more.