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Wow, are you me? Every morning we have a company wide meeting where capturing more market share is a recurring theme. And immediately after that meeting yester

Wow, are you me? Every morning we have a company wide meeting where capturing more market share is a recurring theme. And immediately after that meeting yesterday in a developers only meeting, an inordinately large amount of time was spent on discussing how we can introduce new features yet still accommodate those of our customers who don't have internet access. Because, as you know, if you want to capture more market share with software in 2016, you want to focus on people who don't have internet.

freehunter 10y ago
That was a theme at a place I used to work a few years ago, but it was internally. How can we accommodate employees who don't have Internet access at home. Mainly focused on truck drivers who live a hundred miles away from their distribution center and park their truck at home at night, with the question being "how can they log their miles". So we needed a VPN that could support dial-up, and a trucker logging tool that supported dial-up, but also the helpdesk support tools needed to be able to be used on dial-up so the helpdesk could walk them through any issues interactively. But we didn't want to spend any money supporting it, so we kept a Windows 3.1 server running so we could run the Novell system that truckers used to log into the dial-up VPN with. We finally put Internet access in all of the warehouses and told the truckers they had to end their night at the warehouse and log their hours there. Several drivers quit because it was too much of a burden to drive that far every day. But then we finally got to upgrade the software to support showing customers where the trucks were at and how long it would take to get to their locations. It would be awesome if technological progress was more evenly distributed across the population.
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  My argument in the meeting was that our company has over 15,000 clients who are businesses themselves, and maybe 100 of them don't have internet access. Most of these clients intentionally keep their computers disconnected because "the internet causes viruses". I understand that any good company wants to provide quality service to all of their existing customers, but dedicating resources and devising workarounds for that small percentage of disconnected customers (to the detriment of the thousands of others) while our mission statement is to "capture market share" seems counter intuitive to me.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I was agreeing with you and trying to provide a complimentary example :) It's hard to grow when you're hindered by the long forgotten past.
    - fluxquanta 10y ago
      Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to come off as confrontational in my response. Just venting frustration to the aether.

freehunter 10y ago

That was a theme at a place I used to work a few years ago, but it was internally. How can we accommodate employees who don't have Internet access at home. Mainly focused on truck drivers who live a hundred miles away from their distribution center and park their truck at home at night, with the question being "how can they log their miles". So we needed a VPN that could support dial-up, and a trucker logging tool that supported dial-up, but also the helpdesk support tools needed to be able to be used on dial-up so the helpdesk could walk them through any issues interactively. But we didn't want to spend any money supporting it, so we kept a Windows 3.1 server running so we could run the Novell system that truckers used to log into the dial-up VPN with. We finally put Internet access in all of the warehouses and told the truckers they had to end their night at the warehouse and log their hours there. Several drivers quit because it was too much of a burden to drive that far every day. But then we finally got to upgrade the software to support showing customers where the trucks were at and how long it would take to get to their locations. It would be awesome if technological progress was more evenly distributed across the population.

fluxquanta 10y ago
My argument in the meeting was that our company has over 15,000 clients who are businesses themselves, and maybe 100 of them don't have internet access. Most of these clients intentionally keep their computers disconnected because "the internet causes viruses". I understand that any good company wants to provide quality service to all of their existing customers, but dedicating resources and devising workarounds for that small percentage of disconnected customers (to the detriment of the thousands of others) while our mission statement is to "capture market share" seems counter intuitive to me.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I was agreeing with you and trying to provide a complimentary example :) It's hard to grow when you're hindered by the long forgotten past.
  - fluxquanta 10y ago
    Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to come off as confrontational in my response. Just venting frustration to the aether.