Browser Wars and SaaS—Don’t be a Casualty

Top Browser Share Trend

July, 2009 to May, 2010




Take a look at this table and the graphic.  (Click picture for a larger version.) If it doesn’t make you afraid, you don’t understand the situation.

The basis for software as a service (SaaS), things such as Salesforce CRM, Google Docs, and a whole raft of others, is the ability for a browser to present a fair imitation of a locally installed application.  To do that, the creators of SaaS products rely on certain standards.  If they say, “XYZ” to the browser, they have to be confident it will display, “XYZ” and not “xyZ2”.  Look again at the table.  As of May, 2010, nearly one in five internet users was still browsing with the hoary IE6, a browser never renowned for adherence to standards and now far, far, out of date.

Look over your own user base.  What types and versions are they using?  How is that impacting their experience and how does that reduce or enhance security?  Too often we build to the specifications of the latest and greatest and totally ignore that many of our people may be accessing our SaaS applications with something much older or more obscure.

Is the solution to build applications to the lowest common denominator?  Absolutely not.  Doing so is self-defeating and freezes development at a given point.  The solution is to support a reasonable number of browsers and at least one back from the current version AND to encourage/force end user upgrades.  Easier said than done in some shops, but at the finish, there is no other answer.  Until you get a handle on this issue, the ghosts of the past will haunt your current projects.

Thoughts?  Your experiences?  Suggestions? 

Miracle Cure

Hamlin’s Wizard Oil cures rheumatism, diphtheria, sprains, corns, cramps, lame backs, and diarrhea.  Sounds like some amazing stuff!  No doubt the linear descendant of this patent medicine now claims to, “Create a world class, global, multilingual, CRM system, with integrated reporting and full quoting ability, using only point and click administration and requiring less than a day to setup”.

Let me see a show of hands.  How many of you have felt a tingle of amazement and interest when you hear pitches from salespeople as they explain how version 9.3 is completely different from 8.5 (8.5 being the version that almost destroyed your company) and how the new features change the game?  Be honest.  That’s what I thought—pretty much all of us have.

Guess what?  I’m here today to tell you, “STOP IT.”  Put your big boy or big girl pants on and grow up.  There are no free lunches, no miracle cures for corns, cholera, and cooties, and there are no simple solutions to complex problems.  Get over it.  The sooner you let go of the false hope, the sooner you can move into the realm of real progress.

Don’t worry; all isn’t as gloomy as you may think that I am implying.  There are great products and services out there.  Salesforce is tremendous.  Google offers free and low cost products that have rocked the world.  The difference between reality and marketing exists in expectation. 

Don’t be fooled by demos, ads, or conferences.  Every solution to a challenge is work, and lots of it.  Set your expectations and those of your management and users correctly.  Leave the miracles to Our Lady of Lourdes and concentrate on value, hard work, and progress.  Be skeptical, diligent, and demanding in any technology transaction, but particularly with CRM systems; your career may depend on it.

Creepy or Cool?

Latitude is a free program from Google that lives on your smart phone and tracks your location via GPS or cell phone tower triangulation.  You can accept “friends” and then display your location to them (and them to you).  You have the ability to give them the most accurate location, city only, a manually entered spot, or no location at all. 

Recently, Google has taken this one step further and now you have the option of saving your constantly updated history and displaying it on a dashboard.  You can track where you have been, how far you have traveled, and where you most often go.  According to Google, this data is available only to you, can be deleted, and is not used for advertising to you.

The tech guy in me says, “Cool!”, but the man raised in an age where electronic monitoring was reserved for criminals on probation says, “Creepy.”  I can see where this would be interesting and maybe even useful, but as we all know, any information put on the internet is inherently insecure.  No server is 100% safe and no transmission is totally proof from intercept.  On a more mundane level, what happens when the NSA, CIA, or some other three letter agency shows up on Google’s doorstep with an order to surrender the records?

I’m really undecided.  Part of me is excited about seeing patterns in my life and maybe making my routines more efficient, but another part is horrified.  Opinions?  What do you think?  Are you going to do it?  Sound off and let me know, please.