Brian Behlendorf Interview

Robert McMillan writes: "Linux Magazine has an interview with Brian Behlendorf where he talks about what he's up to at Collab.net, and reminisces about the good old days at Wired. Did you know that he registered the macdonalds.com domain?"

Comments

web sites for big business

[Submarine]

It does not surprise me in the least that companies such as McDonald's, a few years ago, would not even know what registering a domain name means. The truth is that today most big companies make a Web site (because everybody does it) but more often than not it is absolutely pitiful.

Web sites for big business often have the following characteristics:

• display in extenso the company's organigram but hide information on products;
• are filled with buzzwords ("our middleware system will improve your corporate efficiency by improving synergies between work units" as opposed to "our integrated email/chat server will allow your workers to communicate faster and more efficiently");
• do not contain contact information, and if they do, more often than not a phone number only (hint: the Internet has supported email before supporting http/HTML);
• contain lots of unnecessary junk like Flash, animated GIFs, sounds and Javascript.

It is funny that those big companies pay so much for PR services that cannot even understand:

• that people do not have a whole day to look for information in their badly setup site;
• that not everybody has a personal T1 line and that even if they do they might not be willing to install a new browser/plug-ins whatever just to consult a catalogue.

It is interesting to note that after a few years of experience with the Minitel in France, the successful Minitel sites had the following characteristics:

• straight to the point;
• efficient ordering and order tracking systems;
• minimize transmission times.

I guess that corporations do not learn from experience sometimes.