Things I Hate About the Net

Seana Mulcahy in today's MediaPost talked about "Things I Hate on the Net". Now, she's not a techgal - she a marketing / branding babe - so among her listed items the usual litany of email scams, popups / popunders, spyware, broken / dead links, site registration, poor integration (what else is new), audio surprises (you know, those suddenly singing or talking little bursts when you're on a conference call - it's happened to me), and click-happy sites. Most of these are products of bad site design that are easily remedied - fire the marketing department and get a good designer. But some of these are tech-derived marketing inventions (surprise!) intended to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in our crazy-quilt Internet. We wouldn't see much of the latter right now if a fundamental issue was resolved. And it's actually a business mindset, not just a marketing or tech mindset.

So, "What do I hate about the net?" Simple - you can't evolve anything new or tune something to get around problems, because everyone bets on failure and wants to exploit it for their own private purposes. I hear this all the time from technologists, inventors, and businessmen. "Take no risks". And it's betting on failure that spawns all these customer plagues today that Seana so loathes.

I've always found it fascinating that the same marketers and salesmen and bizdev types who whine and bemoan spyware, spam, and viruses overloading their PCs also want to keep those same loopholes for themselves. Hey, it isn't a spam - it's an "informational email". Hey, it isn't spyware, it's just collecting information on our customers in their "natural setting" like an anthropologist. And hey, it's not a virus, it's just a brochure with extras so we can serve the customer better.

Let's face it - you can't plug the holes without losing an "unfair advantage" over the customer - even if most people are too ignorant to play this game. It's the fantasy of using it that matters - not the reality.

The upshot - the smart crooks win, the techs play the filter and drop game, and the rest of the world gets overloaded with spam, spyware, and viruses until they choke.

Want to solve the problem? Simple. Make everyone play by the rules. No unfair advantage. No exceptions. No use of spam - ever! No use of spyware - ever! No use of built-in mechanisms to obtain even benign control / information of a personal computer - ever!

I'm not holding my breathe.