‘The pace at which New Zealanders took up broadband did not budge an inch last year, even as debate raged over unbundling and Government moves to split up Telecom. ‘

An except from an article on Stuff.co.nz which goes on to say according ‘…to statistics reported last week over 50% of people in NZ are still on dial-up… Statistics NZ admitted its claim yesterday that New Zealand had jumped three places from 22nd to 19th in the OECD table for broadband uptake might not be true.’

No kidding…

And from the blog of Trade Me software development guru Rowan Simpson ‘…the latest Trade Me server stats show about 83% of people use one of the variants of Internet Explorer (including 1.2% on IE5.x – who are these people and don’t they know somebody, ANYBODY, who can help them to upgrade).’

But wait – it gets worse, ‘…and ‘on the screen resolution front, there are still about 14% of people out there using an 800×600 monitor.’

Simpson then goes on to question, how many people in the industry use IE, a monitor with a resolution of 800×600 and are on dial-up… ?

Yes, unfortunately I see where he is going with this…

‘…There are usually a handful of IE users, but never any 800×600 users or dial-up users. I do this to point out how poorly most technical people relate to “normal” users. It depressing! But, let’s not pretend that the audience is something that it’s not.’

‘It’s depressing’ – what an understatement!