It’s a Mortar and Click Holiday Season
It's beyond me how retailers are surviving this holiday season. I have little patience for crowds and lines. I have even less patience for paying more for something just to have it today.
Amazon, with or without the Prime membership option, has to be killing the sales of physical and other online retailers this year. I went out at lunch today with the intention of picking up some sports equipment for my home gym, a couple of Kettlebells and a Bosu Ball. When I walked into Sports Authority, I guess several people had the same idea of running in quickly to pick something up, I've never seen such a long line. I also can't stand the way they rat maze you into the a single set of registers, I'm sure some efficiency expert recommended this set up, but there's something to be said for being able to choose from several registers and perceiving you picked the shortest line possible. My stomach turned as I walked in and spotted the line, despite the sickness I walked back to at least check into the items I wanted to pick up. I found the Bosu Ball set and quickly found that it was $50 cheaper at Amazon and was available on Prime, which means I can get it shipped for free in 2 days or pay $3.99 to have it at my door the next day. I added it to my cart on Amazon's iPhone app and went to take a look at the kettlebells. The kettlebells weren't exactly cheaper on Amazon, but within $20 of the price, I was already saving $50 on the Bosu ball and the rest is saved on not paying taxes and plain old convenience. I added them to my cart and checked out, while standing in Sports Authority admiring the line I wasn't standing in.
Back to my original thought, who were the people in this line, my items will arrive tomorrow and are guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. Unless the rest of retail is not paying attention to Amazon or situations like this, or the typical shopper just hasn't caught on yet, I just don't understand why you'd wait in that line. What happens when the typical shopper smartens up?
Google Abandoning IE6 Users in 2010
As a Google Apps admin I received the following email this past Friday, announcing that IE 6 will no longer be supported by the end of 2010. This is fantastic news, hopefully others will follow suit and convince those users hanging on to this god awful browser to move on to better things. If you are still on IE6 you should upgrade to Chrome, it's a top notch and very fast browser, you'll never look back.
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team