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

Mark Cheng mark.cheng at ranger.com.au
Thu Jul 12 01:54:40 CDT 2001


>[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of 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...

Accessibility. Not useability or degradeability.  Try running your Excel 98
Macros in Excel 2000.  Or worse, vice versa.

>
>> 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...

You used the magic word - customers.  Stores/malls routinely adopt
techniques to keep some users out.

>is it 10% overall?  10%
>per month?  10% of people who would have otherwise bought lots
>of stuff?  hard to tell...

I don't know - Martin came up with the 10%.  An illustration of the problem
with statistics!


>
>> 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...
>

Actually, is it academic?  aren't the aggregate stats saying you can reach
80% of a hell of a lot of people by targeting ie5+?  That's a hell of a
potential customer base as it is.

>> 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...

At last I know :)


>> 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...

Yeah, but if I was advising a client on an e-commerce site I'd go for the
highest level of encryption available in the browser population.  For an
ecom site security of comms between the browser and the server should
dictate - business risk will dictate what level of encryption the client is
happy to accept.


>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...
>

You've heard of the phrase lies, damn lies and statistics?  imho statistics,
used properly and in context, can be valuable if you have a full
understanding how the information was obtained in the first place.

>> 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...
>

eg not serving images to Lynx, stuff like that.


>> 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...

That comment wasn't aimed at you.  it was a general response to a couple of
earlier responses implying that web designers had a responsibility to
encourage clients to design degradeable sites.  I agree with your approach.


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