Microsoft is going down, and they just don’t get it. I just read a “PCWorld.com”:http://www.pcworld.com article about “browser market share”:http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116848,00.asp. Apparently, IE has lost 1% of the market, which isn’t much, but it’s the most significant downturn for them since June 2002. The downturn has been attributed to the “US-CERT recommendation”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6746-2004Jun25.html that people stop using IE.
Here’s an excerpt I found particularly asinine:
bq. Microsoft shares its users’ concerns over security and encourages users to “examine all options,” a company spokesman said in an e-mail statement. The company believes that factors such as functionality and manageability, “as well as security backed by the processes and engineering discipline employed by Microsoft,” will convince users that IE is the best choice, he said.
Best choice, my foot! The functionality and manageability of IE pale in comparison to every other browser on the market, and don’t even get me started on security. I’m not sure what “banana truck”:http://images.google.com/images?q=banana+truck Bill Gates fell off of, but if he doesn’t wake up and smell the browser war, he’s toast.
Well, the way they presented the numbers, the math is a little misleading.
bq. [Microsoft’s] market share has slowly dropped from 95.73 percent on June 4 to 94.73 percent on July 6.
Okay, so the average person is thinking to themselves, “95.73 percent minus 94.73 percent equals one percent. Okay.”
Now…
bq. Mozilla and Netscape’s combined market share has increased by 26 percent, rising from 3.21 percent of the market in June to 4.05 percent in July.
Okay, so now the average person goes, “Huh? How can 4.05 percent minus 3.21 percent equal 26 percent? Shouldn’t that be 0.84 percent?”
What they didn’t explain is that you need to divide 0.84 by 3.21 to get 26 percent. They did this by dividing that 1 percent from Microsoft by 95.73 to get 1.0446 percent.
Anyway, just a little math to spice up my afternoon.
Oh, and what’s this “banana truck” expression from? Should I know that?
Should it be banana boat or something? I dunno.
Thanks for the math lesson.
How important is the “browser war” to Mr. Gates? I mean, most browsers are free to users. I don’t see any ads attached to my browsers, either. Are computer-engineering companies making money with their browsers?
Yes, it would be nice to get an updated IE browser from Microsoft. I agree that IE is a little behind, and it could use some work as far as features and security go.
However, I see it from the point of view of the company, as well. As long as Microsoft has nearly 95% of the market share, and THAT amount isn’t really handing them a profit, they’ve got to be thinking, “What’s the point?”
No good businessman would waste his time on something that isn’t improving his bottom line in some way.