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Fortunately, one of those tough decisions IS NOT which web browsers your product needs to support. Compared to a typical product decision, it's stupidly simple--- you look at your server logs to see who is using what browser, and then you simply calculate what % of users you are screwing by failing to support Browser XXX. (And when you work for a certain popular search company, you have pretty good data.) So when I need to have a technical debate about this (and it's sad that there ever is a debate, but whatever), it's one of the few arguments that I feel I can be confident about. Discussions typically go something like this: Engineer: The product works great! |
Engineering a software product involves many tough decisions, both technical and product. You rarely have enough information to be sure of which technology is best, what features customers will like, etc. And we spend a lot of time debating these tough calls amongst ourselves--- engineers have different intuition, and product people have different guesses about what customers want.My favorite example of such thinking is from a Previous Employer of mine (let's call it "Yippee!"). A team had spent six months developing a site and were scheduled to present to executives for launch approval. A VP fired up IE on the conference room computer and the demo commenced. Every single page on the site triggered a security warning *and* a Javascript popup error. Eventually the browser just crashed.
The team lead started to load Firefox and said "we should really be giving the demo on Firefox." An SVP responded: "not if you want to launch any time soon."
Posted by: Ken Norton at November 17, 2007 12:21 PMFirefox for us, boo IE 6! And don't even talk about IE 7! ps is there any way to ask the customer ahead of time instead of guessing? Other companies call them focus groups. Not sure what is feasible with software companies. Sure wish the people that make hospital software would have asked us first.....
Posted by: bev at November 27, 2007 02:45 PM