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mattnewport comments on How to come up with verbal probabilities - Less Wrong
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Define wasted - I assume people generally put effort into making things work in IE because they expect to increase their audience as a direct result. For a profit making enterprise anyone investing time in making things work in IE is presumably doing so under the expectation that it will deliver a positive return. For a non-profit making enterprise the expectation is presumably that the increased audience is worth the expenditure based on whatever measure is used for the value of a larger audience.
Is your claim that people in fact consistently overestimate the return on investment for ensuring compatibility with IE? Or that relative to some hypothetical global optimum money is 'wasted'? If the latter, how would you attempt to evaluate the waste?
I'm sorry, that was unclear.
What I intended by the word was simply that from an aggregate perspective, the optimal solution would be everyone, as matt said, using a good browser instead, which would require minimal effort by users, and make the time investment from developers unnecessary.
Still, I've edited to the more neutral spent.
ETA: I suppose if you wanted to put a dollar value to "time wasted", you would have to subtract off the dollar value of the time it would take for each present-day IE user to download Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, etc, import any bookmarks, and become familiar with its workings up to the level at which they were previously proficient in IE. This amount is non-negligible, and I was wrong to overlook it, but I strongly doubt that it is of the same order as the developer-time spent.