Scott Adams - you rock!

I love Dilbert - and sometimes, Scott Adams is so completely in sync with my own thoughts. Today's cartoon is a case in point. I'm SO sick of so-called website designers who think flashy = information. You can add all the pop-ups, cute icons, jquery layers and AJAX that you want (all the things the cool kids are doing) but if your website doesn't make for an easily navigated, informative site, then it still sucks big time. I recently took a supplier I deal with to task over just this - they replaced a perfectly good, easy-to-use basic HTML website, with a confusing mess of graphics and icons (with no apparent purpose) and a bunch of jquery that is poorly tested and just doesn't work. Their response? "Our customers love our new site".... Hmmm... and exactly how do they know that? They definitely hadn't heard of a UI designer, and I doubt they'd actually evaluated the site with a panel of real-world users. OK - rant over; here's the cartoon!

Netflix, diminished

We watched "The Kids Are Alright" last night. fun movie, though highly predictable. What we didn't expect was the warning at the beginning "This DVD is intended for rental use. Extras are available if you purchase the DVD or BlueRay version". Sure enough, though they hadn't changed the actual menu structure, you couldn't select any of the extras, like the Director's cut etc

I noticed a while back that the DVDs we were getting had a uniform label - silver on light gray (so easy to read - NOT). We used to get the 'real' discs, but apparently Netflix had some deal with the manufacturers to have Netflix-specific labels. The DVDs were still for the most part full versions. Now it seems, all we'll be getting is the movie.

This kind of gels with the move Netflix says they want to make - away from DVD distribution (an expensive model, requiring people and buildings) to purely online delivery. However, that's getting a little odd too. I have a lot of videos in my "Instant" queue, but each week, the queue gets shorter, as Netflix 'retires' some of the movies from their catalog. I assume this is a licensing issue, since keeping a huge catalog on disc wouldn't be any kind of overhead for the company. What this means is that I have to keep an eye on the queue, and watch things that are expiring - not convenient.

Add to that the fact that Comcast, our broadband supplier, is now pushing heavily their own 'on demand' services, both via their clunky cable version, and their new (just like Hulu) website. And of course, they now have control of a lot more content, having acquired NBC; and they're still trying to figure out how to charge us and/or Netflix more for delivery of Netflix streaming content.

The upshot of all this; I think we'll be getting a lot less from these services, and paying more.