http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/te...pagewanted=all

Kevin P. Casey for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Every time he fired up his Netscape Web browser since
mid-February, John Uribe was greeted with a message urging him to
switch to one of Netscape’s two successors, Firefox or Flock.

Jerry Gropp, an architect, has stayed with the AOL dial-up service
because he finds it easy to use.

The missives came from AOL, Netscape’s parent company, and warned him
that Netscape, which introduced millions of people to the Internet,
was about to become a digital orphan. On March 1, he was told, AOL
would stop providing support for Netscape, leaving a band of users
loyal to the pioneering Web browser to fend for themselves if they ran
into technical problems.

Mr. Uribe, a 56-year-old real estate agent in Waldorf, Md., ignored
every message.

“It’s kind of irrational,” Mr. Uribe said as that deadline approached.
“It worked for me, so I stuck with it. Until there is really some
reason to totally abandon it, I won’t.”

The technology industry thrives on its ability to sell new products to
consumers at an ever-increasing pace, and it has turned many upgrades
into painless, one-click operations. But millions of users of nearly
every type of Internet service and technology, from Netscape and AOL
dial-up to old e-mail systems, still prefer to ignore the pitches and
sit still — or at least move ahead at their own pace.

Mr. Uribe, a professed late adopter, is one of them. He still has
dial-up Internet access at home and he does not lust after the latest
tech gadgets. He is content with his aging Dell computer, which he
said has an absurdly small amount of memory.

He is hardly alone. Netscape users accounted for 0.14 percent of the
Internet population in February, according to OneStat.com, which
offers Web monitoring services. That is a tiny fraction of the market,
but still represents more than a million users, many who use aging
versions of Netscape.

Meanwhile, more than nine million people still pay $10 to $25 for
AOL’s dial-up service when faster broadband service is available in
most parts of the country, often at comparable prices. Dial-up is a
rapidly declining business, but it is not an insignificant one. After
all, it accounted for most of AOL’s $5.2 billion in revenue last year.
Yahoo updated its popular Web e-mail service last year, but tens of
millions of its customers stuck with the company’s “classic” e-mail.
And on the Well, a pioneering online community founded in 1985,
hundreds of people communicate using an archaic text-only system, even
though a Web-based graphical interface has been available for years.

“Every other online conversational space has a toolbar where you can
plug in your favorite winking face,” said David Gans, a musician and
radio host, who has been a member of the Well for 22 years. Mr. Gans
says he uses the Well’s text interface, in part, because it helps to
keep the quality of conversations high.

“Just because you can have a nuclear-powered thing that can dry your
clothes in five minutes doesn’t mean there isn’t value to hanging your
clothes in the backyard and talking to your neighbor while doing it,”
Mr. Gans said.

New, of course, is not always better, and people hang on to existing
technologies for a variety of reasons, including loyalty, satisfaction
with what they have, fear of time-consuming upgrades and even inertia.
In the age of Facebook, blogs and micro-blogging services like
Twitter, these are forces that technology companies need to understand
and address as they bet their fortunes on their ability to market a
nearly continuous stream of new products and upgrades.

Experts say that late adopters, or technology laggards, are not
necessarily Luddites and can play a pivotal role in keeping the beat
of innovation.

“Laggards have a bad rap, but they are crucial in pacing the nature of
change,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley.
“Innovation requires the push of early adopters and the pull of
laypeople asking whether something really works. If this was a world
in which only early adopters got to choose, we’d all be using CB
radios and quadraphonic stereo.”

Mr. Saffo said that aspects of the laggard and early adopter co-exist
in most people. They may buy the latest digital camera, but end up
using only a fraction of its features, or they may proudly tote an
iPhone but still pay their bills by check, rather than online.

At 81, Jerry Gropp, an architect in the Seattle area, is a bit of
both. He has a high-speed Internet connection through Comcast and Web
e-mail accounts with Yahoo and Hotmail. But he still pays AOL for its
dial-up service, largely because the desktop e-mail software packaged
with it makes it easier to include maps, photographs and notes in the
body of messages, rather than as attachments.

“I’ve been on this for about 20 years,” he said about AOL’s service.
“In some ways, the old may be the best, combined with the new.”

Technology laggards are neither new nor unique to the Internet.
Consider, for instance, that an estimated 13 million households are
ill-prepared for the switch in February 2009 to all-digital TV
broadcasts. And individuals and businesses alike have long complained
about the upgrade “treadmills” that benefit software sellers, but not
necessarily buyers.

But the Web has changed things. In the past, many late adopters
upgraded their software only when they bought new hardware or when
they were forced to because they could no longer read the files they
received from others. Now, Internet companies can, and do, deliver
upgrades with a flip of a virtual switch — not always to the delight
of their customers.

In mid-2006, AOL turned its Netscape.com site, a once-popular portal
that had faded into near obscurity, into a “social news” site where
users’ votes would determine which items received top billing.

The experience proved disastrous, as many of the mostly late adopters
who still relied on Netscape.com, the default home page for the
browser, disliked the change. AOL reversed course a little more than a
year later, but not before losing about half of Netscape.com’s users
in the United States.

AOL declined to comment on the experience, but a spokeswoman pointed
to a message in a company blog explaining the September 2007 course
reversal: “We received some feedback that people really do associate
the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially
controlled.”

Dan Clifford, managing partner and founder of AnswerLab, a research
company that conducts usability tests for clients like Yahoo, Intuit
and eBay, offers a rule of thumb for Internet companies that want to
succeed with upgrades. “People need to think about order of magnitude
improvements in terms of benefits, efficiencies or costs,” Mr.
Clifford said.

Yahoo thought it was delivering such a vast technological improvement
when it began unveiling a new e-mail system in September 2006.
Eighteen months later, tens of millions of the company’s estimated 250
million e-mail users are still using the old service. Yahoo is now
supporting both, saying it is happy to give customers a choice.

“We have effectively segmented the market between people who have
embraced the new interface and functionality that is in it, and others
who are very content and have built their lives around the classic
Yahoo mail interface,” said John Kremer, vice president for Yahoo
Mail.

There are times when people hold on to older technologies simply out
of nostalgia.

“I am not rational about these things,” said Stephen Lee, a doctor in
Hanover, N.H., who still has dial-up access and e-mail from
CompuServe, an online service founded in 1969 that AOL bought in 1998.
“I have a soft spot for it,” he said, adding that he did not like to
see early Internet icons fade into oblivion.

It’s a similar sentiment that made Mr. Uribe hold on to the Netscape
browser, even though in recent years the software had become nearly
indistinguishable from Firefox, the much more popular open-source
browser.

But last week, Mr. Uribe reluctantly decided to upgrade, after reading
an article warning that Netscape, without support, could become a
target of hackers and virus writers.

“I won’t continue using Netscape for old times’ sake,” he wrote in an
e-mail message. “I’ve imported my bookmarks into Firefox and will
remove Netscape from my computers. To avoid temptation.”