Forum Moderators: phranque
I don't really know what they do, because I can't use them--they both require Windows. I know there are smart people at Google and Yahoo, but they obviously had no say in this. How will you get influencers to praise your product if they can't run it?
That reviewer is from planet Zorkon.-grelmar
I believe it's Nathan Torkington.... co-Author of "The Perl Cookbook, Second Edition" among other things.
He got hung up on platform issues and missed what I think is the more interesting point ---- Google is trying to become Yahoo!
Picassa is the latest sign --- GMail, Blogger, Google Toolbar, etc.. are also components to allow Google to ultimately turn itself into Yahoo! (albeit without the years of online community building and brand identity for things like Yahoo Groups, Personals, etc..).
Google would have been better off to throw some money at craigslist.org (like eBay did).
[cnewmark.com...]
Footnote: Nathan's reference to "Yahoogle" (mentioned twice) is just as likely --- combine the two. Here's a blogger who scooped up the name.
[yahoogle.com...]
And Apple has an even worse record for supporting an old OS than MS does. Ever try and get support for OS 9.x? Software for it?
I wrote the first shareware program ever released for the Mac, Reversi, back in 1984. Because I wrote it to the Mac UI guidelines, it still runs on OSX, 20 years later. Similarly, an internal application I wrote for subtitling japanese animation in 1989 is still in use at my company.
Apple has been very good (though not perfect) about making sure that old code doesn't break, despite a radical change in processor family and underlying operating system.
Given that we are where we are - surely it is up to manufacturers such as Mac etc to make sure their products are compatable - why should it be someone elses problem to accomodate them!
Just my humble opinion
Yahoogle are proponents of some of the worst markup on the web, but even they ensure some cross-browser capability. I expect their sites to work in any browser I choose, but as I said, I have no expectations in terms of their software.
Brett ..maybe you really ought to move over to firefox ..no problems to access the page ;)
Not really - if a major company can't make their site accessible for a browser like Opera 7, then that's utterly pathetic - and much worse that not making some Picasa variant for OS/2 Warp, or something.
if a major company can't make their site accessible for a browser like Opera 7, then that's utterly pathetic
Could the reverse argument not apply?
What is the point of launching a browser that has problems with main stream sites that others do not?
Surely the onus is on them to provide a flexible and universal product
1. "BETA"
2. "We will add support for additional platforms in the near future."
Tom
Now, it's Yahoo's site, and they obviously have the right to restrict access to it. They could, for example, have chosen to password-protect it. But they've chosen to restrict access in another way, to those using IE versions 5.1 (whatever that is) and above.
The choice is theirs. They could have made it open to everyone. Nobody made them restrict access. Please don't claim that it's the responsibility of the writers of (first-rate) software - or, indeed, of any other third party.
Does this restriction make commercial sense? Given that the use of IE is on the decline, probably not. But, in any case, if they don't want me to look at their site, then I won't.
Added: Just seen ergophobe's reply. Does this mean that they're developing for IE and then going to tweak their code to suit W3C-compliant browsers? Now I'm convinced they're a bunch of amateurs!
[edited by: TheDoctor at 7:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 9, 2004]
Is it Yahoo and Google whom don't get it or is it MAC....
The fact that Gmail doesn't support Opera on any platform makes me think it's Google.
<snip>
/rant
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 9:57 pm (utc) on Sep. 9, 2004]
[edit reason] please ck the tos - we do not post email msgs on webmasterworld [/edit]
Added: Just seen ergophobe's reply. Does this mean that they're developing for IE and then going to tweak their code to suit W3C-compliant browsers? Now I'm convinced they're a bunch of amateurs!
I would have to say that this is also incorrect (or possibly correct but not supported by the evidence). They purchased an application that the original designers designed for IE only. Yahoo! thought it was good enough technology to release as a beta, but they are waiting until they can make it available on more platforms before dropping the beta designation.
If it turns out that it would have been easier to recode from scratch and they could have done so without violating copyright, patents or trademarks, then, worse than amateurs, they are stupid investors. I suspect, though, that they actually want and needed to purchase the copyright, patents if there are any, and the trademark, and that it will be easier to make the existing site compliant than to start from the beginning (since presumably most of what they are buying is on the backend, which has nothing to do with one browser or another).
As a general rule (and as people say ceaselessly about Mozilla products), it's unfair to make judgements based on a beta, and especially in this case when the folks developing the release version didn't develop the beta anyway.
Tom
It's about the $$$.
As a general rule (and as people say ceaselessly about Mozilla products), it's unfair to make judgements based on a beta, and especially in this case when the folks developing the release version didn't develop the beta anyway.
Point taken.
Heck, MS still releases patches for 98. -grelmar
Re: the article, the writer makes a logic error which I feel obliged to point out. He claims alpha geeks are mac users and consumer look to alpha geeks to make purchasing decisions. If that is true, then everyone would be using macs. And that just ain't true. Even if every PC-using friend of a Mac user agreed that Macs were better, there are other factors that influence a persons decisions.
From a business perspective, I don't think the percentage of users really matters. 95% or 5%, the real question is units sold. How much extra work is it to get an extra 100,000 customers? Or, perhaps more accurately, up to an extra 10 million customers [apple.com]?
Let's not forget that developing cross-platform from the start [developer.apple.com] can have advantages that would make the costs go down.
Isn't being an "Alpha Geek" an oxymoron? How about "Alpha Poseur" instead?
Maybe the reviewer was just upset he didn't get the super-uber-alpha-geek [happyworker.com] for his birthday.
I was a die-hard PC and Linux user till early this year when I got an iBook. I can run nearly all the same software under OS X as under Linux because.. yes, get this.. OS X is a form of UNIX! If you want to get down to a BSD vs Linux argument, that's a totally different thing.. but Mac OS X isn't some bizarre esoteric platform, you know. The only stuff I can't run are certain games.. but that's what keeping a PC around is for. Any decent software will run on multiple platforms.
