[ NNSquad ] Re: What do users want

[Edward Almasy <ealmasy@scout.wisc.edu>]

On Dec 27, 2007, at 11:59 AM, Barry Gold wrote:
> And I've noticed that most ISPs don't even bother to support any  
> browser except IE, any mail client except Outlook/Outlook Express  
> (plus whatever is most common on the Macintosh this year).  Why?   
> Because Firefox and Opera and Konquerer and the other browsers out  
> there account for maybe 2% of customers -- combined.  So it's not  
> worth the money to write scripts for the support drones to follow  
> for those other programs.

I'd just like to point out that while this was more or less true at  
one time, it's definitely not true today.  The most recent numbers  
I've seen put the worldwide market share of IE at just under 67% and  
steadily (if slowly) falling, which means that users of Firefox/Opera/ 
Konquerer/etc represent almost one out of three end users (higher in  
the US).  The average ISP customer isn't the technologically clueless  
sheep that they once were, to be herded at whim.


> You never know when the next "killer app" _will_ require running  
> servers (and provide a system that configures them without you  
> having to think about it).  And any ISP that has decided hard line  
> "no servers" is going to have to rethink things in a big hurry

If "server" equals P2P, then that killer app is here already.   
Blizzard and others are using P2P (effectively BitTorrent I think, in  
most cases) today to distribute software updates to millions of  
people on a regular basis.

Ed