Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

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>"In short: a simple web-form system shouldn’t end up installing Internet Explorer 8 for you. I think it’s interesting particularly because no lean startup would ever ever do this in a million years, yet we aren’t particularly surprised when a big company is flushing dollars down the toilet in this way."

I would hardly be surprised if doing it this way saves ATT millions of dollars. The default browser for Windows XP is IE6 and a large percentage of new ATT internet customers are highly likely to use whatever browser is on their system, and even a small fraction of ATT's customers is millions of people.

Also keep in mind that this default behavior was almost certainly implemented several years ago when the use of IE6 was even greater than it is today in order to avoid lengthy technical support phone conversations with people like your grandparents when they purchased their first computer.

I'll add that it costs ATT very little to only directly support IE - sure a few calls from Firefox users escalate but that is probably offset by the fact that as a market segment those users are more likely to be technically savvy.

ATT knows its market segment in a way that most startups would do well to emulate - and recognizing how their setup procedure goes to their bottom line is a valuable lesson about focusing on MVP rather than perfect code.

Well, and how these reasoning justifies the need of ActiveX (the solely reason of IE8 installation) in order to fill in a web form?

They probably hired a company like Accenture/Deloitte/etc who flew in a small army of 30-40 people to align the customer enrollment process with some enterprise infrastructure standards.

Since you don't need 40 people and a couple of $700/hr partners to build a web form, they broadened the scope of the process to pick low hanging fruit or synergize paradigms.

That may make no sense to you, but I'm sure it sounded good at the 16th hole (and 4th cocktail) at the country club when the $700/hr partner was pitching it.

I suspect that ActiveX enabled browsers allows them to further reduce support costs, e.g. installing a 32 bit version of IE8 allows the Flash driver to be installed thereby reducing calls from grandpa whose new system came with a 64 bit version of Windows 7 and therefor uses the x64 version of IE by default - not to mention that ActiveX also allows ATT to install more powerful software on the customers browser for support and tracking purposes.

64-bit Windows actually uses the 32-bit IE by default. You have to use a special Internet Explorer (64-bit) shortcut to run the 64-bit version. I don't think that's an issue.

And -

To (hopefully) install a shim that lets them install software that lets their help desk help their customer more effectively. If I were trying to support millions of 'ordinary users' and had them calling me every time anything didn't work the way they expected, I'd want something on their desktop that let me help them (a gotomypc type of agent, for example).

I don't think the parent is trying to justify the overall ridiculousness of the process, merely explaining what their rationale would be for even going down the IE-only path in the first place.

I'm not sure if anyone can justify the need for ActiveX in this case.

The assumption that ATT needs to do it, is like assuming that a website needs to use cookies - it doesn't follow the money. The article implies that this process costs ATT millions, whereas logic would make the continued existence of such a practice unlikely and analysis of ATT's cost and revenue structure would indicate that it probably has the opposite effect on their bottom line.

ATT's homepage for DSL customers is Yahoo, and it is heavily Flash dependent. The same logic that serves as part of the justification for Apple's iOS strategy underlies ATT's decision making - reducing options to reduce support costs and enhance user experience. It is better if Grandpa's introduction to the internet has everything working when he lands on your homepage for the first time.

Again, ATT knows their market segment.

I don't quite follow you. You seem to be saying that AT&T is smart enough not to do things that aren't cost effective, so there must be a reason for this.

I think that's overly generous. Aaron Patterson spoke at RailsConf. He said he works for AT&T, and to submit an expense report, he scans paper receipts to a PDF, emails that somewhere, which converts the PDF to a fax, which faxes it somewhere else to be converted back into a PDF.

That is clearly a stupid process. It's not there because AT&T has analyzed the business logic; it's there because a large, old business can accumulate layers of bureaucratic process more easily than a small, young one. There are more committees and more inertia. And maybe if you make billions, wasting thousands of dollars worth of employees' time doesn't make you sit up and take notice.

I'd guess this web form is a similar problem. If you have a 5-person company, everyone in the company hears customer feedback and maybe talks to customers personally. I doubt the CEO of AT&T even knows this form exists.

The experience of an employee such as Aaron Patterson is pretty much irrelevant to the bottom line given more than two orders of magnitude difference between the number of employees and customers (~260,000 employess vs ~100 million wireless customers without counting landline, internet, and TV customers). [http://www.att.com/gen/investor-relations?pid=19251]

The fact that they are leveraging legacy business processes rather than reengineering them for the sake of aesthetics (keep in mind thtat even with reengineering Aaron would still be scanning his receipt and the person in accounting would still be dealing with a PDF and it doesn't cost them anything to use idle bandwidth because they own the pipe).

Don't misunderstand me, ATT doesn't get any of my money because of my past dissatisfaction with them. My point is that it is a mistake to misinterpret their webpage in the way the article does.

[edit] In fact the process of converting PDF's into faxes and back into PDF's makes a lot of sense from a document management standing because it will convert Aarons 2400 dpi 32bit scan of a Chili's receipt to the 100 dpi 1 bit image which is sufficient to do the job. Thereby reducing long term storage costs, standardizing the stored format, and almost certainly integrating with the initial portions of the office automation system which no doubt were designed to convert faxes from the field into digital documents for use by accounting staff.

>The assumption that ATT needs to do it, is like assuming that a website needs to use cookies - it doesn't follow the money. The article implies that this process costs ATT millions, whereas logic would make the continued existence of such a practice unlikely and analysis of ATT's cost and revenue structure would indicate that it probably has the opposite effect on their bottom line.

Well, that's one way of interpreting it. Another way is to say that AT&T is a monopoly provider and therefore has no incentive to cut costs. The fact that the setup process is baroque doesn't cost AT&T anything - its not like customers have a plethora of alternatives for their broadband access. So, what AT&T optimizes for is cost of development, and I can assure you it was cheaper to develop this "solution" using half-trained consultants than it would have been to develop a well-designed setup page using experienced software engineers.

I don't quite follow you. You seem to be saying 1) AT&T is smart enough not to do things that aren't cost effective and 2) forcing people through the pain of getting a particular browser improves their experience later, or maybe their ad views on Yahoo. Is that right?

Remember it is easy to detect IE6 using on the client-side using JS and on the server-side using user-agent detection. Then if the ActiveX is really needed, you can do that using JavaScript too.

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