This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased.
I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?
[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]
I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times.
The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't provide you with the "fuck you"-money needed to never have to do it again.
If it matters that much to you, just say "no" when they ask if you support IE6. However, I agree with the article: it's a good strategy which seems to have worked for at least one person.
> And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.
If you passed through your subcontractors work without reviewing it, you did do a crappy job.
> I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.
That's assuming a lot about other peoples priorities. You'll be surprised how many perfectly qualified people who does not place the same premium on creative freedom you do.
If you find yourself with a lot of well-paid IE6 work, spending some time on elance finding someone good to offload it to and putting him on a handsome retainer could turn out to be a very good investment.
If you're jacking up prices in an attempt to drive away business, I think you can afford to buy pretty good work. But if we go by your logic, no good IE6 compatibility work ever gets done, so expectations will be low anyway.
In this case, what's more likely is that some customers will see the extra cost for IE6 as an unfair charge and just not use your services at all. I don't agree with them necessarily but put yourself in their place: They are not responsible for the state of Internet browsers and for Microsoft's low browser quality.
So if you apply this otherwise good practice, make sure you communicate it well and price it very transparently. After selling someone of the wonderful benefit of a beautiful web application or site, it's always hard to backtrack and say that standard web applications like browsers actually can get very clunky and that some will cost a lot to support.
> Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?
Well sure, that's why you've been agreeing to do it for that price. If doing it so much makes it not worth it, increase the price even more, eventually demand has to decrease.
The thing is I don't see the business case for paying extra money for IE6 compatibility, at least not any serious amount. After all, Windows Update is free.
This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased.
I wonder how applicable this phenomenon is here. You could easily become known as the "ie6 web design experts" who corporate drones turn to first. Sure, you'd make tons of money, but is that what you really want?
[EDIT: Lots of us are constantly dealing with the trade-off between whoring ourselves out for high paying shit work and doing what we really want. Just sayin'.]