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."

Comments

Slashdot employees

[fembots]

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.

ab0rken?

[KFury]

Either VisitorVille responds to slashdotting by saying it doesn't have data, or some companies were *really* fast with their privacy injunctions.

For Free

[sg3000]

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.

When

[AnonymousCowheart]

When is slashdot going to post their server stats??

IE overcounted

[spud603]

It's likely that IE would get overcounted, at least by a little bit. with firefox and with safari, it's not uncommon to spoof the user agent to show up as IE (to get around sites that check your user agent and won't let you in if you're not on their browser list).

I don't know how much this could account for, but at least a little.

VisitorVille = spyware

[complete loony]

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... :)

Re:IBM employees

[Alan Cox]

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.

Re:Look, I'm not anti-Firefox but...

[Baggio]

Hard to be a tester (depends on the product of course) if we don't consider other browsers...

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 ;) so of course we're going to use the competitions products for development and testing for completeness.

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.

Here's a small sample

[ravenspear]

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%