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98% isn't much

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Re: 98% isn't much

#301

Post by inigyou »

wccrawford wrote: post #25

Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…

It may be a different 2% every time. Eventually you can cover 100% of your users with 2% 50 times, and 100% of your users will feel your software only works 98% of the time. You can get a reputation as an unreliable vendor.

That can happen but it's usually not that extreme. But you should think about it. Negative reputation spreads faster than positive.

And if your software already supports something then all you have to do is not break it. That's usually easier than making it work then first time.

Re: 98% isn't much

#302

Post by inigyou »

tikhonj wrote: post #300
Eridrus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the guy writing the article seems to be bad at math and thinking. Can I imagine a venue kicking out 2% of their former clients on some criteria? Absolutely yes. Kicking out 2% of website visitors may still be totally reasonable if the cost to serve them is meaningful, or if they are less than 2% of revenue. His defense for 98% being bad is that some CSS thing people were arguing about only had 70% coverage…

Kicking out 2% of your existing customers in a physical venue violates people's expectations, so it's going to get you disproportionate bad reviews and word-of-mouth. Good thing that we've managed to keep everybody's expectations a hell of a lot lower for software quality then :)

Every nightclub in Berlin has a few Google reviews that say "we were black and they didn't let us in because they are racist." These are the reviews you will see on Google and it can dampen your excitement before you even leave your home.

Re: 98% isn't much

#303

Post by thephyber »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #175
wccrawford wrote: post #25

Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…

Former chef here (2 Michelin starred restaurants). 5% is beyond plenty; it is awesome! > works for 98% of the population, that means that it won’t work for ~150 million people If I can only cook for 70 people a night, I most likely can't serve the ~150 million people who do not have access to modern browsers. And, those who do have access to those browsers and choose not use those browsers likely will not enjoy my fo…

This reply doesn’t apply to the article, at least not the way you think it does.

(1) The article is talking about how dissatisfying 2% of your market is not a small issue. And the 2% of the market the website dissatisfies are unable to express the feedback reliably.

You are talking about cooking in the same room/ship as your customer, which has a fast and reliable feedback cycle. Your scenario has the advantage of being able to learn about and fix the issue on the current meal or perhaps as slow as 1-2 days. The article is about something which you may never know about so it may never get addressed.

(2) In my experience, each complex feature is its own circle in a not-perfectly-overlapping Venn diagram, so the 2% compounds and far more than 2% of your customers suffer failure from any one of the failures. This is more analogous to each ingredient in the food you select has a 98% chance of working and each dining utensil has a 98% chance of working for that meal.

(3) you are playing sleight of hand with that 5% figure. Your 5% are self-selecting people and highly affluent. This is a very narrow niche of the market and the attitude you take of “you can’t please everyone” doesn’t really work when our target customer is used to getting exactly what they want and you depend on repeat business from a small pool of customers.

(4) I’m guessing you didn’t simply ignore important adjustments like deadly food allergies, hence you aren’t really making a fundamentally different argument than the article. You simply worked in a field where mistakes are far more visible/obvious and the feedback cycle is faster so you learn not to make the same mistake (or people stop trusting you with their meals).

If instead of looking at the 98% figure in the article and thinking “I can’t please 100% of people”, but instead consider “what happens to my customer satisfaction if I move that slider up a little and what else happens if I move it up a lot?” You might actually learn something.

Re: 98% isn't much

#304

Post by inigyou »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #149
card_zero wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile in Britain in the 1960s, this cost-cutting closure of local rail lines did happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts ... at a time when the trains and rail infrastructure had been publicly owned for about 15 years already. It doesn't dispel the incentive.

I have never heard the name Beeching spoken with more venom than in Wales, I used to live in Mid Wales and now I live in Cardiff. If I wanted to visit where I used to live by train, I'd have to do a multi-hour detour of a sightseeing trip around the West Midlands, deep into England. The Beeching Axe literally cut Wales in half and the consequences are felt to this day, even though there wasn't much outright salting t…

> anywhere that wasn't London-centric suffered, which is the British government to a T regardless of the party in power

I've heard that if you remove London from statistics, the UK has the economy of an Eastern European country after the fall of the USSR.

Re: 98% isn't much

#305

Post by inigyou »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #196
MatekCopatek wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a cynical take, but I doubt Ticketmaster (and most of these other examples) are motivated by doing the most good. Their underlying principle is extracting the most value for shareholders at any cost. Some people argue even that behavior ends up producing the most good, but I cannot accept that level of mental gymnastics.

There is a limited amount of engineering resources. Don’t you agree they should try to use them for the benefit of the most people? That’s not to say they should exclude groups. But a small minority path probably gets less work than a main path. Would you agree these prudent or not?

Is Ticketmaster bottlenecked by engineering resources?

Re: 98% isn't much

#306

Post by inigyou »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #252
account42 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not using bleeding edge web "standards" is also hardly comparable to the office of having a physical presence in every locale though. Software developers seem to be uniquely good ad overvaluing small convenience gains for themselves compared to the pain inflicted by breaking compatibility multiplied by the set of affected users. Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This…

A lot of the time it's not software developers who define it and it's about the budget. Usually it's the product decision. E.g. an agency who has constant recurring experience with it might indicate that supporting N% browsers costs this much with cost increasing the higher the percentage. E.g. you want to use CSS flex you might get 97% to 99% of all World users, because there's going to be certain percentage for whi…

In my experience usually it's the software developers trying to push blame onto other people. Sometimes it's a total rewrite or a new product and you actually have to ask how far back to bother supporting (devs are still the ones who ask this). But most times when support is dropped from an existing product it's because a dev brought the question up first.

Re: 98% isn't much

#307

Post by epihelix »

mattmatheus wrote: post #178
londons_explore wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of people with old android phones with no free disk space using ancient browsers. There are plenty of people still using windows 10 with updates turned off or wedged for whatever reason. These people just use the sites that work. They aren't computer experts, and might not even realise why half the internet doesn't work - they just think that's the way things are.

I'm not sure this is a realistic use case to try and support. A 10 year old android phone likely has a battery life measured in 10s of minutes, and really isn't something we need to worry about.

I'm currently using >7 year old Android phone. The batteries on these things are child's play to replace (especially after you've done it the first time and removed the pointless adhesive in the battery compartment). I will consider upgrading once new devices return to feature parity with my current device (apparently never).

While I'm of course an edge case, the fact that Google, Apple and Samsung all provide >5 years OS support for devices now (and battery replacement services) suggests that many people hang onto their old phones for a long time.

That said, I'm not using 7 year old software on my phone. That would be insane. And my browser (fennec) was updated just a few days ago.

Re: 98% isn't much

#308

Post by inigyou »

dlcarrier wrote: post #260

Over the last year, only ~70% of the visiting browsers supported the new CSS features. Even thought this feature is “widely supported” in a general audience, for my audience, it left out 30% of the visitors. That mirrors my experience using web pages to order things. They work ~70% of the time. Often while I sit there repeatedly pressing a 'buy' button that does nothing, or playing around with my browser's developmen…

Stripe payment somehow gets Firefox into an infinite loop for me. Have to kill the process and try again in Chrome.

Re: 98% isn't much

#309

Post by inigyou »

Panzerschrek wrote: post #97
xdertz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how about also getting rid of all regulations for wheelchair friendly infrastructure while we are at it? Way too expensive and it is even less than 2% of the population that requires it.

Public infrastructure is different. It should work for everyone. My argument is more about commercial products with profitability kept in mind.

In a lot of countries, commercial products have to be wheelchair-accessible or you get sued.

Re: 98% isn't much

#310

Post by inigyou »

BeetleB wrote: post #237

> Can you imagine a venue refusing entry to former clients 2% of the time just because they’ve “improved their experience”? The web has been doing this since, when, the 90's? I use Firefox. In the last year, suddenly quite a few web sites have just stopped working on it for me. Firefox is over 2% market share.

That's old data? It's under 2% now.
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