What Web Survey Companies Need to Learn
Every once in awhile Microsoft sends me user surveys. I received one yesterday. I guess I should clarify that MS contracts with various outside vendors that do surveys for MS. But I really have to wonder about a company that creates a survey web page that can only be answered by using Internet Explore (as is the case in the one I got).
More and more people are using browsers other than IE (see stats here, here, or here) so if you want to have the maximum probability of getting good results to a survey you need to code the survey pages so that it is browser independent. This is not hard to do given all you have to do is write it to a generally accepted W3C standard (e.g.,HTML 4.01, in effect and stable since 1999). Do that, and just about any browser should be able to do the job.
Write it to use "features" specific to IE, or uses security holes like javascript, and you lose a growing percentage of users. While I can understand a company using the latest whiz bang feature of MS and not caring about non-IE users or security, it seems to me they are essentially cutting off their nose to spite their face. In other words, the only entity being hurt by using IE specific features is the survey taker and so, what competitive advantage is that?