Comments on: SaaS vendors be careful.. plan for the mass market

By: Yves Hiernaux

Yves Hiernaux — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:02:44 +0000

Xero has made a really smart move choosing Accounting network to deliver its software. Using this, they have a real chance to reach non early adopters and to cross the “chasm”.

Just because of that, IE6 has to be kept since they will probably follow a different path than other SMB SaaS providers using pure online marketing.

By: Rich Chetwynd

Rich Chetwynd — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:27:59 +0000

Dropping IE6 would be great but it’s definitely not an option for Litmos yet. As a training product 1 customer for us can see our reach go out to a large number of users within an organisation.

Just looking at our current browser stats for actual users of the system the breakdown goes something like this.

IE 67% (IE7:40%, IE6:60%)
Firefox 25%
Safari 7%
Other 1%

The majority of our customers are call centers or manufacturers, typically not your early adopter crew i suspect so that could explain the IE6 dominance.

By: Rob Coup

Rob Coup — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:28:34 +0000

Nigel Parker from MS ran a session around phasing out IE6 at Barcamp on Saturday. He presented some NZ stats – around 25% of browser sessions in NZ are IE6, and most of those are running XP pre-SP1.

Some is big organisations being slack (looking pointedly at a number of Government departments here). But for Home/SME users – if they’re on dialup there is no way they’ll ever get through Gigabytes of updates in 20 minute periods of email-checking a few times a week. IE updates, Windows updates, Adobe updates … they all add up. And they need to be on XP SP2 before they can install IE7.

Either they’ll need to install CDs with the relevant updates on, or they’ll get a new computer because their current one will die. I don’t see any other options.

By: Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:30:09 +0000

@Terrence – I reckon you want to have a look around a few Ma and Pa SME’s before you come to that conclusion…..

By: Terrence Wood

Terrence Wood — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:25:15 +0000

I suspect that organisations with large centralised desktop deployments are the last bastion of IE6. I also suspect that this is not Xero’s target market and they could easily consider dropping IE6 support before year end given the sharply declining trend.