Broadband usage still under 50%

March 12, 2007

Whenever I present to a group of technical people I always ask for a show of hands and ask these questions:

There are usually a handful of IE users, but never any 800×600 users or dial-up users.

I do this to point out how poorly most technical people relate to “normal” users.

Meanwhile out in the real world …

According to the latest Trade Me server stats about 83% of people use one of the variants of Internet Explorer (including 1.2% on IE5.x - who are these people and don’t they know somebody, anybody, who can help them to upgrade)

On the screen resolution front, there are still about 14% of people out there using an 800×600 monitor. I assume many of these people have hardware which is capable of more, but they just don’t know how to make the change, or don’t care to?

And, according to statistics reported last week over 50% of people in NZ are still on dial-up.

It depressing! But, let’s not pretend that the audience is something that it’s not.