Re: [tlug] Browser share in Japan?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Martin G writes:

 > If so, then maybe "market share" is a useless and empty concept
 > when talking about browsers.

Indeed.  Actually, my argument is that it's harmful, in that it
redirects attention from what's actually profitable, which is your
market share of *customers*.

The browser a customer uses is an interesting fact about the
customer.  I am quite sure that customers who use Safari are different
from customers who use IE8, and both are different from customers who
use Iceweasel.

Some products (CDs by AKB48) probably are hard to distinguish by
browser.  Others (products that run only on the Mac) are going to have
browser user shares of page views that are wildly different from
global averages, and the conversion rates of page-views-to-sales are
also likely to differ wildly, I suspect you will agree.

So targeting your page by browser share is dumb, very dumb.  What you
want to do is target your page to potential customers.  So you go with
the browsers with high "correlation X user share", and ignore the
others.  If there's a significant correlation between potential
revenue per customer and browser, the strategy of targeting
high-user-share browsers will lead you astray.  If there isn't, then
the correct rule reduces to using browser user share as a *proxy* for
customer market share.  If you can get those correlations, then the
correct rule is no more expensive than the simple one (after all, your
spreadsheet will do the multiplications for you).

Now, this is all obvious to anybody in the field, I suspect.

The problem is remembering that it's *only a proxy*.  The Harvard
Business School casebook is full of cases where companies failed in
part because some department got hung up (perhaps even with monetary
incentives from the executive board) on a simple metric like browser
user share.  The simple metric probably was appropriate when
originally established, but when the market changes (and it inevitably
does), that metric is as useful as following the taillights of the
lemming in front of you.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, "Watch that first step.  It's a doozy!"

Avoiding use of the term "browser market share" is one easy trick to
help watch the first step.