look vs substance, and greed again

[miriam_e]

I've just been looking online for easy-to-use public transport maps and timetables. This was partly prompted by Erika's inability to get a public transport map at a rail ticket office at Flinders Street station recently. That struck me as weird. Those maps were available when public transport was a public service. Could it be that the private companies now running our public transport don't understand the importance of letting their customers know how to find their product? They spend millions on TV, radio, and print advertisements but can't afford to make cheap maps available?

Anyway, I digress...
I was checking out the net for simple maps and timetables. What I found was a lot of glossy, pretty, but difficult-to-use pages that are loaded down with useless extras. For instance there was a cute little Flash map tool that loads into a page without menus or anything that might let you save it to your hard drive. This means that if you want to use it you must be online; you can't simply use an offline copy to look up what you need to know. This is a pest. Also the window is limited to an irritatingly tiny viewport that makes it difficult to see any reasonable length of journey so I thought I would try loading it into a Flash editor and alter it to make it more usable. (I got the .swf file out of Netscape's cache.) But astonishingly the file is protected against loading into the editor! A map that is given away, supposedly to help customers, is jealously guarded as if it was some valuable work of art! It is just a goddamn map!! It is derivative of countless other maps... and yet it is protected. Isn't this taking greed a bit far?

After quite a bit of searching I found some train timetables. (I never did find the tram timetables.) I've set my computer to ask me whether to accept cookies or not, and this became a major drag as every link into the timetables called for several cookies. In the end I got so sick of having to deny this constant stream of cookie requests I simply disabled all cookies for a while. Sensible use of cookies can be of genuine use to a site, which is why I normally like to decide whether to grant or deny cookies as I go along, but this is a waste and smacks of collecting info on their customers for no good reason.

When I finally did get the timetables onscreen I was no longer surprised to find that almost half of the html was devoted to pretty, but useless crap. It would have been very easy to have simple, unadorned pages that listed the info the poor customer is waiting for. Instead the pressure to produce decorative magazine-like pages is so great that almost half the code of the page and perhaps 98% of the bandwidth was taken up with useless extra garbage.

What the hell is happening to the net?

Comments

[chrysb.livejournal.com]

Hi Miriam, It's chrysb. I've finally worked out how to use lj better(I hope). I liked the above comments on the privatization of public tpt. Often you can obtain general info at booths situated in burke st. but not at the train station as there is seldom staff, or the staff have no idea of whats available. As for the rest companies now have this idea that the more bells and whistles that are on a product the more they can charge for it. Then there is also the concept of keep changing the product to appear to be up to date. Common sense or what the 'consumer' wants doesn't come into it. It's what the company tells us what we want.