Slashdot Mirror
How Company Employees Use The Web
An anonymous reader submits "VisitorVille Intelligence has released information on how employees of several large companies use the web based on their monitoring of thousands of websites. Presumably using IP address blocks, they group company employees together to produce some interesting facts and figures: Microsoft employees use Google for their searches 66% of the time, but MSN Search only 20% of the time, and Firefox is their second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer 6's whopping 98.76% share. Google employees use Google as their search engine 100% of the time
and 21% use a Mozilla or Firefox browser. Apple employees like Google best and 68% use Safari.
91% of Internap employees use Mozilla or Firefox, Deutsche Telekom AG employees are the biggest users of Linux, and 39% of Sun Microsystems employees use SunOS. Other groups of interest to Slashdot readers include: The White House, the United Nations, The New York Times, Red Hat, and IBM."
It's nice to see slashdot employees don't do anything on the internet :) Full company list is here by the way.
And IBM is using Windows exclusively?
I wonder why it doesn't show the top 5/10 visited sites.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Either VisitorVille responds to slashdotting by saying it doesn't have data, or some companies were *really* fast with their privacy injunctions.
Kevin Fox
I admitted just did a quick glance, but I didn't find their figures to be credible. I looked the company I work for, and it was listed as 100% Windows 2000 and 100% IE6.
However, we have a mix of Windows 2000, Sun Workstations, Linux machines, and more than a few Macintoshes. Our IT-supported browser is Netscape, not Internet Explorer. So I expected a little more diversity than what they're showing.
Also, their web site says they provide "company specific marketing information". Technically they are providing "market information" not "marketing information". There is a difference. "Market information" means just raw data (which is what they're providing). "Marketing information" means information that helps you make a decision: Should we avoid Flash because too few users at our site have it enabled? This is probably a nit-pick to many people, but for a company offering their research, the difference is nontrivial. The people whom they are targeting their information (besides people just curious for trivia) likely know the difference.
However, based on what I saw reported for my company, their data does not seem to accurately reflect what browsers/etc. people are actually using. Thus you could draw incorrect conclusions from their data.
Maybe that's why the information is free. You get what you pay for.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
When is slashdot going to post their server stats??
I don't know how much this could account for, but at least a little.
well, kindof.. So they track every user who visits a site running their web bug and they *could* sell that information to anyone. :)
BTW I hope they're seeing lots of slashdot tornado's and riots at the moment...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
It seems pretty dubious to me. IBM run some rather decent security so I'd bet they are measuring IBM security service output. Ditto a lot of the other companies listed.
You think ? I'd be surprised if even 10% of /.'s IE-users aren't running as an admin, or are running their browser with a dedicated limited-rights account.
Isn't it possible the browser of choice is artificially skewed towards IE?
I know a lot of users of other browsers spoof their user-agent to stop websites bitching about incompatible browsers.
Mine is set to send IE6.0 WinXP even though I am probably using Lynx on an iPod.
Equally, I imagine some Safari users are quite deliberately NOT spoofing anything to do a bit of evangelism.
Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet
What is interesting though is that almost 20% of MS employees run non-IE. I expect a good percentage of MS employees live the faith and are Windows/IE zealots, I expect MS corporate websites are only IE friendly. It's quite suprising to see such a high % use non-IE. I wonder how many run Linux desktops?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hard to be a tester (depends on the product of course) if we don't consider other browsers...
;) so of course we're going to use the competitions products for development and testing for completeness.
I work in Office as a tester, and during the last product cycle, when we were releasing Office 2003, I did some sanity passes to make sure that Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox failed gracefully in parts of Sharepoint Portal Server that are specifically coded for IE 5.5+. Except for some administration pages, SPS handled N/M/F for most of the content and scaled back appropriately. The result wasn't as feature rich on those alternate browsers, but every effort was made to make them usable for most people.
Naturally IE is the prefered browser, and what most things are written for, but as a company, it is in our best interest to make as many products work on a widely diverse set of platforms. Real users don't run everything Microsoft (although they should
However, when I'm done testing and need to be productive on other things, I use IE 6 and perform my searches through the MSN Toolbar/Deskbar suite. I used the Google Toolbar until the MSN suite was released; try and try as I might, I'm still not sold on Firefox.
Time flies like an arrow;
Fruit flies like a bananna
I recently hosted a mirror of an image in one of my posts that got around 800 hits. This was what my stats were for that.
Browser Version:
Firefox - 39.8%
MS IE - 19%
Curl - 14.1% (probably high because it was an image)
Unknown - 9.3%
Mozilla - 4.9%
Others - 4.4%
Opera - 3.1%
Safari - 2.8%
Konqueror - 1.9%
Netscape - 0.3%
OS Version:
Windows - 56.7%
Linux - 25%
Unknown - 13.9%
Macintosh - 3.6%
FreeBSD - 0.5%
Unknown Unix System - 0.1%
I run my Windows box as a non-admin. It is a bit more inconvenient switching over to the admin account or using run as, but the fact is, not everything works properly anyway.
For example, I have a few ebooks in Microsoft Reader format. Thanks to some activation screwup, one group of books in only readable from the administrator account. Trying to activate from my regular account fails... with the mysterious and false "can't access network" message. Translation: our code is hosed and we have a spurious message, or we can't install the needed bits due to permission screw ups.
Anyway, the whole thing has made me lose confidence in Microsoft DRM.
No kidding.
About a year and a half ago, I was part of the brain-dead "M$ is evil" hordes that populate this site. Then I visited Seattle, fell in love with the area, and someone I knew here happened to work at MS and started telling me about the environment and the people. So I decided to look there, along with other places.
It took 6 months to score an interview, and besides the fact that the 'legendarily tough' interview process was actually rather enjoyable as far as interviews go, I was downright impressed by everything I saw and the people I talked to.
Tomorrow I celebrate my 1 year mark with the company, and I hope to stick around for quite a while longer, as it is much more enjoyable than previous work, the people are smart and really want to put together great software, and I don't feel like a cog in some corporate machine.
It's not a perfect place, but I can definitely say that the bulk of people working here are smart, driven, and really wanting to make quality products. I haven't seen any of the evil that the Slashdot hordes seem to imply permeates the campus in Redmond.
Besides, I graduated from a bland grey cubicle in the middle of a cube farm to my own office which I'm filling with stuffed animals, various gadgets (glitter lamp, purple tube lights), and a pampasan chair. That right there gives a work environment tons of bonus points.
Oh, and I use Firefox and WinAMP on my machine, without any problems. Oh, and Visual Studio 2005 Beta, which I'll just say is 100 times more preferrable than when I was using XEmacs, gcc, and makefiles on Slowaris machines at my last job.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Ahh, Timecube :)
It basically IS the ramblings of a madman.. What I've never figured out is whether he's a genuine nutcase, or just a very dedicated troll. There was even an interview with him on a TV show some time back - there's torrents of that floating around somewhere. Try googling "timecube interview"
If you like that, another favourite net crank is SOLLOG - try googling him, and be sure to check out the wikipedia article
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Actually, most employees at sun do NOT use Windows. It is not supported by Sun's IT department and Sun has not provided Windows machines to employees for several years now. Also, MSIE is not supported. Every employee - including the security persons at the front desks of each lobby - use Sun hardware and Solaris. Laptops are obviously going to be Windows. Especially if they're sales guys, but engineers tend to buy Apple laptops at Sun and use OSX. People using VPNs from home, obviously might use Windows more often than what they use on their desk at work.
If a "huge portion of employees at Sun use windows", it's not out of some mandate. Official policy at Sun is that Windows, Outlook and MSIE are unsupported and not reccomended - especially for security reasons. The only exceptions I have seen tend to be engineers who need to compile, debug and be familiar with Sun software on the Windows platform.
I work at a large ISP and we use a proxy server for all external Internet-traffic.
I could imagine corps like MS and Google do the same.
Wouldn't this mess up such statistics a bit?