Late adopters prefer the tried and true 13 Mar 2008

The New York Times on late adopters:

"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. 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.'"

There are many things to learn from people like Mr. Uribe, but perhaps the most important is that any new version of an application must significantly improve upon the user experience offered by its predecessor. Otherwise, many users won't adopt it.