All That I Know (About Technology)

It seems that every day that goes by, another one of the user interface developers that I work with talks about how Internet Explorer 6 must die. Granted, they have plenty of justification for why this browser should go away. For example, Internet Explorer (aka, IE6) is “ancient” — it was released in late 2001 (source). It has serious security flaws (source) and Microsoft has moved on to release IE7 and IE8. But there’s a problem that non-developers seem to be ignoring.

While IE6 usage dropped significantly in early 2008/2009, the downward pressure has softened quite a bit this year. And a recent survey revealed that IE6 is used primarily at work and the majority of people unfortunately can’t upgrade/replace IE6 because they have insufficient privileges on their machines/their company won’t let them upgrade (source). So without significant force now, it may take another two years before IE drops to a level where enough developers stop coding UI tweaks for IE6. Since coding for IE6 takes significantly more time, marketers are unnecessarily spending money on outdated technology (like paying for a telephone land line or dial-up internet service).

Last week, six solid punches in one swing were taken at IE6. I am speaking about the announcement that Google is planning to phase out support for IE6 (source). The announcement indicated that key functionality in Google Docs and [international] Google Sites will be disrupted starting on March 1, 2010. Since no other popular web destination is stepping up to the plate, we’ve got to applaud Google which owns 6 of the top 20 destination on the web (source) for their efforts. So what we really need to do is convince several US-based companies, such as Microsoft (thank you @cubanx!), Yahoo! and Amazon, and Chinese companies, including Baidu, QQ.com and Sina.com.cn, to jumped on board. While it may feel like we’ve made progress, the short list below demonstrates that we still have a long road ahead of us.

Top 20 Companies that don’t support the IE must die movement:

1. Google (starting 1-Mar-2010)
   
2. Facebook (as of 24-Jul-2008)
   
3. YouTube (starting 1-Mar-2010)
4. Yahoo!
5. Windows Live
6. Wikipedia
7. Blogger.com (starting 1-Mar-2010)
8. Baidu.com
9. MSN.com
10. QQ.com
11. Yahoo! Japan
12. Twitter
13. Google India (starting 1-Mar-2010)
14. Google China (starting 1-Mar-2010)
15. Sina.com.cn
16. MySpace
17. Google Germany (starting 1-Mar-2010)
18. WordPress.com
19. Microsoft
20. Amazon.com

A rumor started to circulate early yesterday that Apple and Microsoft are engaged in discussions over the displacement of Google search on the iPhone. According to BusinessWeek (source), Apple is considering using Bing as the search engine on the iPhone. The reasons that the authors gave for this move included:

• This was a financially motivated decision. Microsoft was offering Apple a bigger revenue slice of the advertising pie for incorporate Bing than Google.
• This was an effort to thwart Google’s recent jump into mobile. It seemed that Google was moving in on Apple’s territory with their introduction of the Nexus One device.

While some may buy into this rumor, there’s very little reason to believe it. Here’s why:

Apple is in the business of designing beautiful devices with exceptional user-experience for the consumer market. Google has dominant position in the web search market. Google reached this point by creating a simple, user-friendly search engine so having Google Search on the iPhone makes for a perfect match. While Google may not want to share more of their search revenue, they’ve bowed to the pressure of News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch when he proclaimed in November 2009 that Google was stealing his paid content (source) and that he would switch to Bing if he had no other option.

Regarding the competitive threat, there are two reasons that Apple may not be worried. First, John Paczkowski of AllThingsDigital wrote about a rumor that Microsoft is planning to release a Zune Phone in the next couple of months (source). In case you’re wondering, this rumor originally surfaced back in late 2008 (source) but this is the FIRST time that there’s thought that the phone will be pink. Currently, there’s no proof that Microsoft or any other phone/mobile OS marker is going to magically recapture Apple’s market share with their mobile offering. This rings true considering that Nexus One sales estimates reached a paltry 20,000 in the first week of offering according to mobile analytics service Flurry (source). If the Zune rumor is taken as fact, then Microsoft is a rival to Apple as much as is Google so there’s no real rush/need to switch.

In my opinion, it feels more like Apple is playing a good game of chicken with Google and Microsoft is just caught in between.

This past weekend, I attended the Atlanta WordCamp conference where we heard from local, regional and national folks about how to harness the power of WordPress for both blogging and web content management (see my WordCamp Atlanta recap for more detail). One of the speakers at WordCamp, Topher Kohan who handles SEO for CNN.com, brought up an important point (indirectly) about the SEO in the future:

Load speeds will impact page rankings on Google (Per Matt Cutt at PubCon, 2009; source)

This is pivotal point where power shifts back to web developers. Why?

If you consider the capabilities of WordPress, you quickly realize that it is one of the premier tools for business users such as social marketers or content strategists to write and publish content online without requiring any technical assistance. And the content that these users produce has value only if it has good page ranking. Otherwise, it has limited reach and that means limited eyeballs and that means failure.

So in one fast swoop, the engineers at Google have taken (some of) that power from the business user and put it back in the hands of the web developer. While the business user controls the content, the web developer thinks about things like limiting HTTP requests, CDN’s, and removing whitespace from JavaScript and CSS files when they think about optimizing a web site. These are only a few factors in web site optimization –  just look at Yahoo’s Best Practices on Optimizing a Website (source) to get a good idea on some additional techniques. Of course, they all require a savvy web developer to implement.

So if you want to ensure that your site ranks well, business users need to hire a modern web developer and treat them well because they (will help you) rule the world wide web.