One year ago today we shipped our first product, designed to help enterprises keep their legacy IE6-dependent business applications working when upgrading to Windows 7. That was a huge milestone for us as anyone who works in software development will tell you: “Shipping is a feature.” But these same experts will tell you that shipping again and again and again is also a key feature. You ship. You learn. You ship again. You learn even more. And the process continues.
Here we are a year later and we’ve learned a lot (and shipped a lot of software too). After constantly improving our initial solution over the course of the spring and summer of 2011, we moved on to design and build our second generation solution. In January of this year we shipped that solution, called Browsium Ion. Ion contains the cumulative learning that began on a year ago and has continued to this day. One huge learning was that IE6-dependent applications don’t actually need the IE6 engine to work in a modern browser. So Ion doesn’t include that engine, instead using the built-in engines in IE8 and IE9 along with highly granular control over all the features and settings in modern Internet Explorer.
The customer response to Ion has been tremendous. The world’s largest and most demanding enterprise organizations are finding its power, granular control, and compatibility to be exactly what they need to keep critical apps running and migration costs under control as they transition to Windows 7. In fact, these customers are learning too. They’re learning that Browsium Ion does a lot more than simply fix their IE6 dependencies. They’re leaning that Ion is an indispensable tool for browser management of modern applications as well, giving them complete control over the platform and settings for every web application. They’re learning that Ion not only fixes legacy compatibility, but delivers the unprecedented ability of future-proofing their critical apps against the inevitable changes & improvements to browsers and run-time components that seem to appear with increasing frequency.
Today’s positive response would not be possible if we hadn’t begun this journey on March 15, 2011. And it also wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for our outstanding customers and partners who put every version of every product we release through rigorous testing and then tell us what’s working well and what needs to be improved.
As we look forward to the future, with new features coming to Browsium Ion and the introduction of entirely new enterprise browser management tools that we’re just now cooking up in our labs, we plan to keep one thing the same: A commitment to shipping and learning and shipping and learning in a continuous virtuous cycle.
A tip of the hat to all of you who have been teaching us since day one and helped us get to where we are today. Thank you, and keep the feedback coming.
