otsukare Thoughts after a day of work

The open Web and local markets

Two simple quotes from this month to express some of the difficulties to maintain the Web open and interoperable. The first one is from a project manager of a north american Web site. The Web site redirects all Opera users to their mobile site giving a very poor experience in the end for the users.

Opera is used by 0.1% of our users on our Web site.

Indeed if a Web site blocks or forbids the normal experience for specific tools, it is likely that these tools will not show up in the statistics.

The second quote is from Peter-Paul Koch who gave a rough overview of the mobile browsers market share in a variety of countries.

To close off this series, here’s an overview table of the five big browsers in the twelve countries. Only Nokia and Opera occur in all twelve of them, …

When we are dealing with the Web, we are often faced with global audiences. Indeed, some Web sites will be very specialized because their main market is localized, but it doesn't cost anything to give access to a broader set of tools and gain users. That might not be significant in your local market, but that might matter at a broader level. It is just business sense to try to grasp the larger possible audience.\