Actually I empathize a bit with the commercial company's situation.
I had occasion to work as a QA tester for a dot com or two that
made Web-based products. The Question before them, in part, was
how many of the following should their QA lab contain to test
their product:
a) Types of PCs and macs, dell, compact, hp, - -, sun workstations
b) Different operating systems, windows 9 this, NT that, linux,
etc.
c) Versions of operating systems - red hat linux, debian linux,
windows 95 versue 98 CE ------
c) Types of browsers: opera, arachne, netscape, IE, lynx - -
d) Versions of browsers, e.g. netscape 4.this 5.that ,
Internet explorer this, that
e) Types of connections: 33K modems, 56K modems, US robotics modems,
Zoom modems, cable modems, DSL, ISDN, T1 lines at companies
connected to ethernets
f) Types of ISP Web servers! netscape enterprise server, etc. etc.
Changes in any one of the above, alone or in one of innumerable combination
often revealed that some feature of an otherwise reasonable looking
Web page do not work at all or did not work as intended.
In the end, at least one company had to decide on a disclaimer when
they sold to other companies (e.g., we will only support this
version of these OSs, with these versions or later of these browsers,
etc.).
Then they have the problem that all of the above keeps changing! How
far in the future should their technical support contracts guarentee
help, or should they promise the current product will work, or will
they produce regular upgrades, etc. etc.
Yuk! Talk about lack of common standards.
