Late Adopters Prefer the Tried and True

smooth wombat writes "There is a fairly significant portion of the population which does not go out and grab the newest OS, gadget, web browser or any other technology related product. Why? It's not because they're luddites but rather, they are comfortable with what they know. Take the case of John Uribe, a 56-year old real estate agent who still uses AOL dial-up and only recently switched to Firefox after being prodded for weeks by an AOL message telling him that on March 1st, AOL would no longer support Netscape. Why did it take him so long to stop using Netscape and make the switch? From the article: 'It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some reason to totally abandon it, I won't.'"

Comments

Enterprises & Browser Stats

[eldavojohn]

Ok, so I tried to go to OneStat which was the site mentioned in the article. The article referenced an "internet population" statistic from OneStat:

Netscape users accounted for 0.14 percent of the Internet population in February, according to OneStat.com, which offers Web monitoring services. That is a tiny fraction of the market, but still represents more than a million users, many who use aging versions of Netscape. But when I went to OneStat, I found it was merely a paid service offered to monitor statistics on your website. I would really like to see that report. Who's website (or group of websites) did they choose? How did they compile this information? The article shows stats grouping all IEs into one and all Firefoxes into one but what are their statistics for IE6, IE7, Lynx, Firefox 2 & Firefox 3? Surely early adopter rates are just as interesting as late adopter rates and surely obscure browsers are what this story is interested in. Why aren't you asking Lynx users why they stick with a text interface?

Which leads me to a motive I did not find in the article, the motive of the company I work for that employs several hundred thousand employees. There is no push to go to Vista or IE7 so they don't do it. They're late adopters in almost the same sense as no one's asking for it, Microsoft has not yet found a way to force the enterprise community into this pigeonhole and so none of them will do it. On an enterprise level, there's no such thing as 'early adopter' as companies are too busy taking financial and strategic risks to welcome technological risks or 1/10 of their employees failing to have a computer for a couple days.