Month: October 2011

Browser Wars… Wait, That’s Still Going on Right?

Rewind 5 years. Ask any self-proclaimed nerd what the browser market shares were. Market share stats were like the stock market ticker of the Internet Nerds. Everybody knew about it, and everybody cared.

But what’s the market shares today? Did you know that IE is below 50% by most measures? Did you know that Chrome ate up Firefox’s market share? And what’s Safari’s market share if all the iPhones and iPads use it?

You probably don’t know.

Because, who cares.

5-10 years ago, it mattered that IE had 70+% of the browser market because it directly influenced what was possible as an application developer. But mobile changed all that.

Mobile browsers ended up being the adoption wedge for HTML5 and alternatives to Flash thanks in large to the fact users — and developers — treated mobile as separate from regular browser apps. What a blessing in disguise: it let everybody start over. And once the mobile stuff got popular and apps broke, people blamed the bad mobile browser (“My ghetto Blackberry won’t load Facebook right!”) instead of the website. It was the perfect storm to force everybody to start adopting HTML5. Add in CSS/JavaScript standardizing tools (Modernizr,  jQuery, GWT, etc.) and developers didn’t even have to do cross-browser testing for simple stuff.

Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but I haven’t bothered testing in all browsers for a year or two now. Stuff just breaks less often. IE7 is “good enough,” and the other browsers work 99% of the time. Thus, the only time I bother checking browser compatibility is if I’m doing something super complex or a user complains.

Good job, Internet. Ya, the evil Microsoft IE empire is still around, but we won the war and nobody even noticed.

Failure Paralysis – The Thing that Holds You Back

We all have this friend: he talks about all the things he will do soon. He’s going to ask out that cute girl. He’s going to start hitting the gym. He’s going to ask for that big raise. He’s going to be more social. Yet, he never does.

Your friend is a victim of Failure Paralysis.

It’s clear that inaction guarantees a lack of success. No success can be achieved by doing nothing. You can’t even win the lottery unless you buy a ticket. This applies to anything: becoming president, getting a girlfriend, losing weight, seeing a movie, etc. The first step, is to start moving toward the goal.

This is the struggle every entrepreneur eventually has to overcome.

A lot of people talk about the uncertainty around taking that first step. The reality is that as soon as you take that first step, you’ll be hit with 100 new issues you never imagined. You can read all day about poker theory, but it pales in comparison to real playing experience. And yet, so many people get stuck in the theory-crafting stage of an idea. Move past this step.

To succeed, you must do. And not doing assures failure.

What are the odds that the idea in your head will become a million dollar company? Well, if you do nothing, the odds are 0%. If you start now, maybe you increase your odds to 0.1% – a literal infinity-percent better odds. The problem is that some people don’t want 0.1%. They want 99%. Thus, they wait while they do stuff to try to increase their odds. But isn’t actually doing it going to increase your odds too? When does the waiting stop and the doing start? Well, for most people: never.

Everybody has excuses to do something later. But only a few don’t let those excuses stop them. Kevin Rose famously destroyed his relationship to fund Digg. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard for Facebook. HARVARD! Actually, so did Bill Gates for Microsoft. Michael Arrington, a now-famous tech journalist, abandoned a career as a lawyer to join the startup world. Even Jack Dorsey bailed (I use this term in jest) on Twitter to go do Square.

Did these guys fear failure? I’m sure. You can’t gamble your future and not be. But that didn’t matter — they ignored all the “sound” advice from their friends and family. I won’t get into each case, but history shows us that if each had waited an extra year or two to make the jump “safer,” they may have missed the boat entirely.

Later is the same as never. Now is the only acceptable time.

Your friends might buy your excuses, but as an Internet-Stranger, I’m going to say the truth: your excuses don’t matter. Results do.

  • Too tired after work? Suck it up or change your sleeping habits.
  • Credit card debt holding you back? Pay it off and quit going out.
  • Not enough time? Manage your time better and quit reading Reddit.
  • Can’t code? It’s OK to suck at it. Learn.

So, take a deep breath, and do something. Anything. Don’t fear failure. Fear not-succeeding.