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.