I’ve done my part in this strange system we call economics: I’ve decided that a product is not worth my time, and I’ve informed the company responsible. This all started with a trip to digg.com. There, I found a link to an article over at scienceaddiction.com. The article covered how the MSN AdCenter product didn’t support browsers other than IE. Since I’m running a small hosting company, I decided it was worth a look. I was appauled to find out that this site filters users using the UserAgent string (a small piece of information sent from your web browser to the site you’re visiting, telling it what browser you’re using).
Upon discovery of this fact, I typed up a small message to Microsoft to inform them of the problem. I’m sure I’m not the only one to do this, but the power comes in numbers. Anyway, I tried submitting this message using the feedback link on the AdCenter page, but this too only supported IE. So, I decided to go to the Microsoft.com main page and submit my suggestion there. Here is the text of the message.
I was a potential customer of your MSN AdCenter product. However, since it does not support my browser of choice (Mozilla Firefox) I am chosing not to sign up. This is a problem for you (Microsoft) since you won’t be getting any of my money. The easiest way to for you (Microsoft) to solve this problem is to code your pages according to web standards, so that you can support the greatest user base.
You (Microsoft) will probably respond in one of three ways to this email:
1. You may throw this email away, and not think anything of it. This would be bad for you, since it would show me that you don’t really care about my opinion. As a result, I would think even less of you (Microsoft) than I already do.
2. You may send me a reply understanding my concern and suggesting that I use Internet Explorer instead of my current browser. However, this would be unwise, because it suggests to me that you (Microsoft) are not willing to change your current business practices to meet customer demand. The result of this would be similar to the previous point: I would think even less of you (Microsoft) than I already do.
3. You could realize that the web standards are not dictated by a single company (like you) just because it happens to have a large market share of web browsers. Web standards are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/), and most other web browsers support these standards to a reasonable degree. This might lead you (Microsoft) to change the way you develop your own pages, so that you can reach a greater number of people, as more people could view and interact with your pages. If you were to take this action, the result would be much different than the previous two points: I would reconsider signing up for this program, and your revenue might increase as a result.
I hope that you will make the decision that is best for you investors, as they are counting on you to make sure that you maximize the revenue in the markets where you exist.
Thank you for your time.
I thought it was quite diplomatic, but you be the judge. 