[thelist] Old Browsers old Software, cut bait and move on.

[aardvark]

> From: "Mark Cheng" <mark.cheng at ranger.com.au>
> 
> Microsoft is a perfect example of how alienating users doesn't make a
> difference to the bottom line.

no, but it does get them tangled up in all sorts of litigation and anti-
trust cases...

and MS actually does a good job of accessibility in their apps, 
when they do them right...

> My guess is have a larger buffer and not piss off 10% of their
> clients. Note that I said clients.  If they piss of 10% of the people
> who hit their website well, so what? There are always going to be
> businesses that try to run on really thin margins, but if your clients
> are trying to do that on the web I suggest you get paid in advance.

oh, i do that, but look at standard business models that aren't on 
the web... alienating 10% of customers is not something they are 
willing to do in the rest of the business world... grocery stores don't 
do it, for example... competition is fierce... is it 10% overall?  10% 
per month?  10% of people who would have otherwise bought lots 
of stuff?  hard to tell...

> The basic problem with trying to predict web sales is that you can't.
> Caches, ISPs, hidden referrers etc etc corrupt the data that you can
> see, which, even worse, is stated in percentages for the most part. 
> What is it a percentage of? US adult male users? Global users?

exactly... which is why so much of this thread is academic... many 
larger sites do focus groups and have qualified researchers tell 
them what those numbers are, and how they break down... for 
sites without those budgets, you have to rely on aggregate stats 
and experience...

> What about the 5% of users that show up as unknown?

those are all my friend Ed... it's what he does in his spare time...

> Businesses make numerous assumptions before they even get to the point
> of saying they need a web site. For a website which is driving sales,
> business doesn't care which browser is used to make the sale.  They
> will care about ongoing maintenance, ease of updating, and the cost of
> putting it there in the first place.

again, that's the rub... we were initially talking about sites that do 
the transaction... it's been modified by the original poster to 
become the marketing sites that fuel the decision to do make the 
transaction...

> Lets assume that the business has identified their target demographic
> as game playing male teenagers.  Now, you may be able to get
> statistics of how many male teenagers used  the net in a particular
> area with what browser - and they'd be about as reliable as asking the
> 5 kids down the street. However, you can assume that they will have up
> to date machines, probably with decent video/graphics cards to help
> them do that.

well, good research is better than assumptions... hell, my first 
focus group taught me that... i know we have researchers on this 
list, but you can get some statistically significant info on a site's 
users in more ways than parsing logs...

> Sure, you can use server side languages to serve up the exact same
> page to each individual browser, just in case, but when you look at
> the effort of doing that compared to the additional percentage of
> sales you'd need to get from the gen 5, is it worthwhile?

huh? you mean coding many pages or no?  i don't code many 
pages, so this is lost on me...

> Now, the major exception here is accessibility.  I believe that it is
> good business to make the site accessible to people with disabilities
> (because it can be costly not to).

or even illegal in some cases... although illegal is such a raw 
word...

> Choosing to use an old browser doesn't obligate a business to provide
> for that.  Web designers need to tell / show the client what the site
> would look like in an uncatered for browser (or with JS off or images
> off or whatever). "Educating" clients that they need to support older
> browsers catering for a possibly small potential audience outside the
> businesses target demographic isn't good advice.

no, educating the client consists of helping them determine the 
stats of their audience, and showing how the site will and won't 
function... i suspect you think i tell them to just support older 
browsers, but i don't do that, i actually show them, and let them 
decide...

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i'm holding it ransom until a notary public notarizes this as 
confidential...