Follow up to Penryn

Yonks ago I posted about the new Intel processor in development with the codename of Penryn.

Turns out a local IT company tried to jump on the panic bandwagon to try and drum up some business and issued some doomladen press releases that got snapped up by the papers everywhere.

I hate this method of trying to get business: scare the shit out of people and then happen to mention in the last paragraph that you can sort it out for them.

What I do love about this story though is the response that it received from those interviewed, generally along the lines of "ah well, yes but it won't _really_ make any difference will it. move along."


Someone else did this ages ago with the Firefox browser, using some distinctly shoddy statistics and a crude approximation of the effects that would be felt.

The screaming headline of "Over 50% of the world won't be able to see your website. you will be DEAD TO THEM!!!!!!!!" actually boiled down to "approximately 15% of the entire world are using this new browser, particularly in tecchie circles, and it's possible that your site won't look exactly like it does in IE when they look at it. Not too much to worry about, but it might be worth having a check sometime, just in case".

Not that I belittle the differences that browsers can have (sometimes quite significant) but as long as the site has been built vaguely properly in the first place, it should be OK.

Of course if you do happen to have a website built for IE that you want found by people using firefox and who just type the word "penryn" into google, I can fix it for about £30k!

Drop me a line...