But how are the individuals choosen?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| TxtEdMacs Nov 25, 2004 2:13 PM EDT |
I would like to believe the numbers, but it depends on how the sample population was picked. It can easily skew the results. I recently attempted to have slashdot provide the statistics on browser usage, because a prioi one might assume that the tech. audience would be heavily skewed towards other browsers than IE. However, from my own experience when on a client's site or even at my own office using their machine for connections I browsed using an old Netscape version and only much later IE. Moreover, there is an additional factor to be considered: slashdot is heavily monitored by Microsoft partisans, which should be expected to be using primarily IE. My prediction was the actual statistics would not be what most would expect. It would have been nice to have at least one data point, but as usual my idea was rejected. |
| mojavelinux Nov 25, 2004 9:44 PM EDT |
The frustrating problem, which I encounter a lot when trying to convince people to try out Firefox, is that employees cannot install software on their computers at work (without going out on a limb). Of course, this could easily swing the other way if the admins decided to put Firefox in the default image. I believe that firefox needs to do a sysadmin campaign or some pitch to get the "defaults" to use Firefox. I just don't get why they wouldn't already be pushing it, but I guess the infamous "corporate" is a dark cloud that looms over the choice of browser software. Why is it that "corporate" is so damn stupid? Aren't these the people running our companies? |
| SFN Nov 26, 2004 6:40 AM EDT |
"I just don't get why they wouldn't already be pushing it, but I guess the infamous "corporate" is a dark cloud that looms over the choice of browser software. Why is it that "corporate" is so damn stupid? Aren't these the people running our companies?" I think I can help you out here. I run a fairly small IT Department that supports about 150 users. Our department uses Firefox with no issues at all. We would love to roll it out to our users and the powers that be would have no issue with us doing so. There's just one problem. We have a single program (a cold storage app) that is browser based. It will not run in Firefox. We get no errors at all. The app just opens to a blank page. This isn't a Firefox problem. It's a problem relating to this app. We spoken with the vendor and their answer is just "we don't support Firefox". They won't discuss it any further other than to offer to put it on a wish list. The response I would expect when telling someone about this dilemma would be "why don't you switch vendors" as that seems to be the standard response from most people. Anybody who's ever worked for a large company knows that going to a VP of Nothingness and saying that we need to switch vendors on one of our most vital apps because they don't support anything other than IE would result in laughter, if not threats regarding job stability. |
| TxtEdMacs Nov 26, 2004 9:14 AM EDT |
Well I was on assignment at a fairly large multinational company and I heard rumors of interest in Linux. I was flatly told that the company history was Sun on the UNIX side and Windows. Moreover, that would be it, i.e. it would be researched to death as a diversion. Despite this, I had offered to be a beta tester on my own time and after an initial burst of enthusiasm I encountered complete silence. The person that was so happy to have gotten my offer refused to answer my inquires and the others outside the U.S. were uncommunicative. Do not remember exactly how, but somehow on searching the chat forums I ran across one on Linux, which due to the character of many of these were just individuals that had interests in certain technologies. To my surprise it was an official effort that seemed serious. I contacted one of the active members and learned the beta was not for the desktop, but only for server installations, hence, the lack of interest in my offer. My impression was the foundation effort may have been going on for about a year - within months the first servers were being rolled out for user testing and later migration to production use. During the year (my last there) the pace picked up until the departing CIO said that Linux was to be the server OS due to the cost savings. I was seeing the Lunux versions of the databases being certified. The comments I saw indicated the performance improvements were impressive over the more expensive Sun servers they were to replace. At least some Linux database servers came on line while I was there. Toward the end of my tenure there was talk about going through the same process for the Linux desktop. However, I have no knowledge how far that has progressed. Moreover, I would have expected the rollout to begin with developers on the UNIX side and other volunteers. The movement is slow, but from the short period I began to hear rumors of interest, to the server rollouts; it proceeded at an impressive rate. But we are talking about more than a year. The one thing that might push corporations towards browser alternatives is the security issue, if MS does not pay attention (which it has - but to me seems more PR than action) they could lose irreversibly the browser share and perhaps the desktop OS fight. A contrary factor I have observed in my group was: too many people, developers not even regular users, seem to like and even prefer Windows so the mass migrations may finally come from above. That is, if it even happens. I finally picked up UNIX on this assignment and taught myself emacs, then later transfered nearly all my coding to the UNIX side. Some others working on UNIX code tended to use simple Windows text editors and just pasted the code over. There were exceptions, however, I did most of my learning after my main mentor's departure. I even added an application attached to emacs where I could run potential stored procedures within the emacs environment (sqlmode). Needless to say, I was considered odd. However, I was put to use, since despite our uniform Windows environment it failed to work with our source code revision system for some machines. It was fine on the UNIX side though not as picturesque. I hope you get the drift of my disorganized set of comments! |
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