[OT] Looking for a statistic

[Richard Gaskin]

Miker Kerner wrote:

 > Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >> What percentage of desktop users' time is spent in a browser?
 >
 > Among my employees, it is definitely primarily browser action.  Even
 > the folks who are running some desktop app or another, including
 > terminal emulators to get into the ERP software, do most of their
 > work in a browser.  We installed Google Docs waaaay back when it was
 > in beta, so there is no office app running.  Material management is
 > a good example of the difference in platforms.  Our desktop users are
 > almost always in a browser, so we have an LC app that we wrote that
 > extracts data from our ERP software to update various Google
 > spreadsheets to keep them (and our customers) up-to-the-minute on the
 > status of inventory/production schedules/shipments/etc., but on our
 > handhelds, we do the same thing in an app.

Thanks, Mike.

That may reflect why this stat is so hard to find for the desktop, but 
unavoidably easy to find for mobile:  the desktop offers such a broader, 
richer variety of things people do that the range of answers to that 
question may be equally broad.

I suspect on the whole you're onto something, that browser use is far 
more prevalent on the desktop than on mobile.

As a developer, I find it depends on what I'm working on: some weeks my 
browser time is much smaller if I'm making OS-native apps than those 
weeks when I'm working on a web app.

And my graphic artist friends tend to spend a very large percentage of 
their time in graphics tools I never touch, and far less time in 
browsers than others on their teams who do development.

When my wife was working with teachers she spent more time in a browser 
by virtue of an organizational preference for GMail and Google Docs. 
Today she's doing much of the same work but less directly with the orgs 
she supports, so time that used to be in those web apps is now in 
Thunderbird and LibreOffice.

Given the breadth of workflows the desktop supports, a single stat may 
not be possible to find.  But hopefully I'll be able to turn up an 
average somewhere.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com