March 14th, 2007 - Customer Experience Gone to the … Foxes?
Shortly after reading Glen Drummond’s post on customer experience disconnects, I had the pleasure of setting up an old, second hand PC at home for the kids to use. Rather than buy an OS upgrade I took it with what it had – Microsoft’s ill-fated Millenium Edition. It was interesting to set up older versions of Microsoft products, complete with pre-anti-trust options like an instant messaging client that wants to make MSN my home page and IE my default browser. Give Microsoft credit – they foresaw the battle for the browser as one of the most important areas of software competition.
Isn’t it interesting how a group of anti-corporate volunteers – today’s mythical equivalent to the noble brigands of Sherwood forest — ended up subverting Microsoft’s browser dominance perhaps more effectively than any court action could? Today Firefox controls 13 percent of the browser market, and the trends all point in their favor. I talked with John Potter, Vice President at CNET Networks not long ago and he told me his kids use the computer regularly and have no idea what Internet Explorer even is.
Which brings me to the customer experience snafu. Having installed Firefox 2.0 successfully, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to have the latest IE version available (for compatibility testing of websites mainly). So I navigated over to the download page for IE. Oops, Windows ME is not supported by this product. For the courtesy of their customers, they could at least have provided a link over to Mozilla.org. 
May 16th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.