Pyro
Expert Member
Pleasure
It's true, most consumers don't care about compression. Storage is cheap and fast. Bandwidth is relatively cheap, and is also fast enough or most users. Most of the content they receive is also already compressed in some way.
Consumers by definition don't produce the content though. If you produce content it gets worked on in an uncompressed format. Distributing it requires you to compress it in some way.
For most types of data there is already some kind of accepted way of doing it, JPG for photos; MP3 for audio; and MPEG4 for video for instance, but for some data it's still a toss-up. Zipping up a bunch of big documents can save a lot of time (and money) if you distribute it to your clients for instance.
Your excel price list might be a 'mammoth' 2MB file, but zipped it might only clock 100KB. The difference between a R4 price tag and 20cents for a client selling your product from home using a prepaid 3G data plan. If you have 100 such clients, that would be a R380 saving to your clients. And while this tiny expense doesn't break the bank, it is just a fraction of the expense small businesses might have to contend with, and an unnecessary one.
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