[Gllug] IE flaws

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 03:34:01PM +0100, Simon Jakesch wrote:
> yeah I have to agree. I have tried everything recently to get people away 
> from IE and to eithetr mozilla or firefox. it is furstrating that you show 
> them a better product that is entirely free and they simply don't use it 
> because they are sooooo used to IE.
> it's ignorance and will never change regardless of how many features IE is 
> missing and firefoz providing... the average user doesn't care about 
> security or tabbed browsing or pop-up blocking. they don't care.

Actually, a marketing rule of thumb is that a competing product must
be 10 times[1] better than the incumbent before it will displace the
incumbent in any meaningful way.

While Firefox is a lot better than IE, I'm not sure it's 10 times
better.  Particularly consider that most people won't appreciate the
improved security aspect because they regard all computers as just
being fundamentally broken, and don't understand why their computers
crash all the time, run slowly and pop up pornographic adverts.  So
discounting all of that stuff which people don't understand is related
to IE, is Firefox 10 times better than IE?  Not really.

http://www.pagtech.com/Articles/10TimesBetter.html

The other point in this rather rambling posting is that most people
have a learned rule of thumb "expensive = better".  Therefore if you
promote Firefox by saying "it does this, and that, and the other, AND
WHAT'S MORE IT'S FREE!", that's counter-productive because it doesn't
conform to a lifetime of assumptions, and makes them think, and people
*really* don't like to have to think[2].

This is a good book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321011473/103-2813745-5855813?v=glance

Actually, for myself I'm using the fear factor to promote Firefox.
I'm telling all my relatives that if they don't want to have their
bank accounts emptied by East European mafiosi, they absolutely *must*
*not* use the Internet and MSIE at the same time.  The only way to
protect themselves is to get Firefox, and keep it up to date.  And
they should probably consider moving to Linux, because Windows is just
fundamentally riddled with aforesaid East European mafia.

Rich.

[1] It's a rule of thumb, and it's invented by marketing people, so of
course there is no scientific measurement of which particular measure
is "10 times".  Could be 10 times faster, 10 times more useful
features, 10 times better tasting, 10 times stronger, ...

[2] Yes, I know all about free vs. Free.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
http://www.winwinsales.co.uk/ - CRM improvement consultancy
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