Which Potential Customers Are you Willing to Ignore?

History repeats itself!  Back in 1996 when the Internet first was opened for commercial applications there was the Netscape Browser soon followed by Microsoft Internet Explorer.  The two browsers and several versions of each with varying degrees of incompatible support were all there was.  The techies thought it was too much work to provide versions of their web pages and web based applications for each.

When my developers told me this was too much work I simply responded by asking which of the thousands of users of each browser we should ignore.

Today the situation has repeated itself with divergent technologies from Apple, Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), and Google (Android).  Today the stakes are much greater than they were back in the 90's!  Today if you choose to ignore a technology you can be eliminating millions of potential customers. 

Just today I signed up for a new free Webinar (desktop sharing) tool and found much to my chagrin that they mandated the use of Adobe Flash and therefore ignore all of the Apple iPAD and iPhone users (over 40 million people).  

This is not an isolated case. 

All too many web sites are driven by people who have failed to comprehend the necessity of supporting tablets and smart phones.  There are still a relatively small number of web sites compared to the total population that have SmartPhone or Tablet specific applications or web pages that provide a good fit for the device. 

Once again its time to shake up your IT organization or if you use consultants maybe its time for a new more modern web service! 

Just remember:  Which potential customers are you willing to ignore?