Big Budgets, Bad Service?

Big companies with big website/tech budgets often have drastically inferior websites. What's up with that?

Why is it so common that major corporations (CNN, NBC, FOX, et al.) have such horrible websites? I’d figure they probably spend a lot more in the way of budget than many other sites for what’s obviously a horrible experience. Over half the time I can’t even access their content because their implementations are so poor. Just a couple of quick examples: NBC.com has about six ways of accessing their video content. About one of them works for me at any given time and even then I usually have to get to the page through some silly method (copy a url, create a local html document with a link to the url…switch my user-agent, and turn off my adblocker, etc.) Their backlogged videos for a particular show may be listed by ‘favorites’ or ‘most watched’ which does nothing for me. I may have to watch the same lame advertisement four times before I actually get to view the video I want (after which I see no advertisements at all) Overall it’s just a crap implementation. CNN.com just plain doesn’t want to work and I’m usually too lazy to bother with firefox for win32 under wine or IE for linux. And the best part here was I took the time to give them feedback. They ask for no email or other credential, and yet after submitting my feedback they had to tell me “we can’t guarantee a response.” If I get a response they’ll have performed their first of three miracles to qualify for Sainthood. Most of the time I don’t really care about these companies or their content. I just think it’s peculiar that given how much they must spend on their internet presence they’re getting completely ripped off. I tend to think there’s a lot of that going around in the world with regard to IT/Software/etc. (That is, big budgets that produce inferior results due to either laziness or ineptitude of the implementers.) Peace, Adam

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