On 2/1/2012 12:20 AM, Alexander Skwar wrote:
It would be a way to go for little or no gain and the potential for
confusion and further time wasted.
I think there's some confusion because you don't understand the big
picture here. This is a tiny group of users (hundreds of thousands) that
will not easily be reached and if we did reach them, there's little we
can do for them. If we're going to expend effort to reach left-behind
users, we should be putting that effort towards the tens of millions of
users who are on unsupported versions of Firefox and urging them to move
forward to a new release. There's no free lunch and we should be
spending our messaging capital on efforts that can actually make a
difference for our users, not on things that will make us feel better
about ourselves but not actually help Firefox users.
> In the end, it would've cost you a LOT LESS, then it costs you now,
> because that missed post stirred up a lengthy communication on this
> list. And this thread did not just cost you time, but also credibility,
> because it "might" lead to the impression, that you don't care much for
> (some?) users, by the lack of communication.
I disagree. Posting here is of little or not cost but it's also of
little or no benefit to our Firefox users. You see costs very
differently than I do. I realize, where you seem not to, that we have
limited bandwidth (time, money, capacity to achieve good press coverage,
etc.) to do widespread messaging to Firefox users and that the more we
use that for campaigns that cannot have a big impact, the less we have
for the efforts that can make a real differences. If we're going to try
to get publicity around upgrades or moving users from one browser to
another (the best we can do for Win2K users) we could spend that same
effort to reach a much larger and more likely to respond audience of
Firefox users who are left behind on old and insecure versions who can
move forward to newer versions.
> Especially because this "issue" (lack of newsgroup posts) has been
> brought up not so long ago already… With someone concluding, that in the
> future, posts ought to be made, IIRC.
I posted to the newsgroup. Posting to .announce would have zero effect
on helping the relatively tiny group of Firefox users on win2K and XP
RTM+SP1. They simply don't read newsgroups. The only way to reach that
audience is with a serious messaging campaign or an in-product
notification. I'm sorry that I've been unable to explain that to you in
a way you'll understand, but that's the way it is.
- A