Despite Androids now 5.4% growth this quarter and now 42% dominance of the US smart phone market, (Apple 1% growth and 27% share of market) still many choose to remain deeply myopic in Europe and Australia to Androids viral growth.
Ignorance is 'i-bliss'?
Even ignoring those childish and bitter mobile patent wars from Apple & Microsoft towards...well, just about every mobile manufacturer, you can see why these two behemoths are trying to stop Google every.which.way.they.can.
..'cos truly no one can suck like they do. Seriously, when it comes to the last five years with their web browser's user experience and strategy, they win at the suck. Big time.
Were not even talking the issues of web standards IE have been plagued with, and why it has been so bad since IE5, I'm just focusing on trying to download the new version!
I had to test with IE9 recently, and so with a glimmer of hope that things can't have got worse, and may have changed for the better, off I trot to be greeted with this monster page:
The download page alone, displays at least nearly 50 different languages and versions. Utter complexity upfront, because y' know the Slovenian Server version of IE9 needs to be on this download page...Yes I grant you this is IE9 Beta, so probably more a geek audience downloading it, but there are many others out there who will. They are called 'customers'. So for most people they then get greeted with this welcoming option;
Now I know what this is above, but for most people I expect the following two thoughts to appear:
WTF is 32bit and 64bit??
and secondly...
WhereTF is Windows XP??
Nowhere, I can find on the site anything to say where the XP version is, and I have to use Google to find out that for over 50% of Microsoft's o/s customers IE9 will not be available for them.
Microsoft do have a statement;
"Since you're running Windows XP, you won't be able to install Internet Explorer 9 unless you upgrade to a more recent version of Windows."
The XP statement they have is very surreptitiously placed within a banner on the IE9 site home page, but it's not clearly marked to me, and if you end up on the download page via search engine as I did, there is zero mention of XP being a no go.
So really...wow. A whole new depth of 'fuck you' is served up here. Several hundred dollars, of perhaps millions if your a business, just to be able to use... a browser. It's clear Microsoft want your money and that's the experience I get. If you have not bought our new toy, effectively screw you and your business. It's not after all, referred to as 'Internet Exploiter' for nothing y'know. This is why your browser share declined for years, is still declining, and will continue to decline.
Dyson should concede, Microsoft again prove their power to suck.
At the movies the other night and treated with this pretty cheese-tasticly awful ad:
Yep, someone, somewhere, got paid for that. Anyway, lured by a glimmer of hope that someone had actually tried to do a hulu.com for Australia I headed over to www.fixplay.com.au Sadly I was disappointed immediately. Each and every programme is fairly old, but some good new-ish shows are there, so some kudos to them. I tried to watch and was greeted by, on every single video;
We're sorry, this video is not available at this time.
I changed browsers and tried again, same thing. Refreshed, nothing. Every single video, all=FAIL! At this point a massive amount of traffic would leave, wouldn't you? I nearly did, but then in frustration at this failure, I eventually noticed a small link way below underneath...
Well that's clear then, eh?
What fixplay have disastrously done wrong, is not put the users experience of the site first. Kinda shocking really, but then most sites don't. And especially after paying for an ad, and the cost of cinema advertising. If me, and in charge? I'd be kicking some bum riiiight about now.
In a world where the flash player for video rules, and is cross platform, and where YouTube is king, Queen and the royal family of online video. Even with HTML 5 video steaming ahead, fixplay have bet badly on the bespoke browser plugin horse.The plugin at fault? Namely, Silverlight. Microsoft's waste of time and not very cross platform answer to the Adobe flash player. Then again fixplay has investment by Microsoft , who also have stakes in channel seven and nine who supply the content. Poor buggers have no choice but to try to flog the plugin.
(Silverlight is frankly, more crap you and your browser do not need.)
So ironically given it's called fixplay, and it doesn't play for many of us, someone does need to 'fix' it. Even updating the message to 'You need to install Silverlight' would be the lazy but more workable option. Although for many, too late, and I for one wont be back. So before you can make an ad and spend money and state your product is 'exciting' and 'change peoples life's', make sure a little ten minute basic user experience testing outside of the office or online with some geeks or beta testers gets done? Please?
It might not change your life, but will change your customers first basic expectations of your site.
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