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A clever way to fight IE6

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Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#91

Post by prawn »

kenjackson wrote: post #23

Of course the problem with this strategy is that you may not be in a vacuum. If I'm a competing shop I simply say that I'll do it all for a price somewhat south of your +IE6 price. And if I have some experienced webdevs who have done this type of stuff since forever, the cost is already largely locked in. Sure I may not be "helping the web" (whatever that means), it may mean a substantial boost in revenue.

I'd rather miss a job because I was too expensive than get it just because I was too cheap.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#92

Post by kenjackson »

prawn wrote: post #91
kenjackson wrote: post #23

Of course the problem with this strategy is that you may not be in a vacuum. If I'm a competing shop I simply say that I'll do it all for a price somewhat south of your +IE6 price. And if I have some experienced webdevs who have done this type of stuff since forever, the cost is already largely locked in. Sure I may not be "helping the web" (whatever that means), it may mean a substantial boost in revenue.

I'd rather miss a job because I was too expensive than get it just because I was too cheap.

I'd rather be rich making 30% margins than broke because I charged 200%.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#94

Post by prawn »

kenjackson wrote: post #92
prawn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather miss a job because I was too expensive than get it just because I was too cheap.

I'd rather be rich making 30% margins than broke because I charged 200%.

I've run a small web-dev business for 12 years and regret every time I've dropped my price to lock in a job.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#95

Post by eli »

someone_here wrote: post #49
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Just keep turning up the dial every time you don't want to do the job. You'll make even more money, and have less jobs. The sky is the limit.

I think that at some point your pricing will just seem completely erratic and would perhaps scare people off who don't even care about IE6.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#96

Post by eli »

armandososa wrote: post #77
tsycho wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to. I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have. A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support…

Everytime somebody says this is a good enough reason to support IE6 my only thought is "screw enterprise users".

Which works great, unless they're part of your target market.

Is the cost of supporting IE6 worth hanging on to those impressions/sales? That's a call you've got to make on a case-by-case basis.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#97

Post by devmonk »

We don't support IE6.

If a client wants IE6, why not tell them to spend that money developing an accessible version of the site? There are going to be more disabled people visiting their site then IE6 anyway:

IE6 stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_explorer.asp

Paper on percentage of disabled rising from US Dept of Commerce: http://www.census.gov/prod/3/97pubs/cenbr975.pdf

Based on IE5 degradation in usage and extrapolation of the IE6 stats, it may only be ~3.5 years (~summer 2013) before IE6 drops to ~0.3% usage.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#98

Post by mgkimsal »

eli wrote: post #95
someone_here wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just keep turning up the dial every time you don't want to do the job. You'll make even more money, and have less jobs. The sky is the limit.

I think that at some point your pricing will just seem completely erratic and would perhaps scare people off who don't even care about IE6.

If the high price is only for the ie6 work, you won't scare them off.

$125/hour for regular work - $350/hour for ie6 work.

People will get the message.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#99

Post by kenjackson »

prawn wrote: post #94
kenjackson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather be rich making 30% margins than broke because I charged 200%.

I've run a small web-dev business for 12 years and regret every time I've dropped my price to lock in a job.

Then you've dropped too low. You certainly don't do it for $1. But I've found that whenever there are other companies with ideological bents (like anti-IE6) I can almost certainly always crush them economically and with respect to quality.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#100

Post by wyclif »

brazzy wrote: post #58
sudonim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard this before. Do you have data to support that claim?

Here's the article I remembered: http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-ju... Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.

I've found this to be true. Firefox is very, very popular in the Philippines on all those pirated WinXPsp3 boxes.
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