Flash, for the hell of it

So, for the first time I went to Pepsi's  web page. I was trying to find some information about the drinks that Pepsi is coming out with that use sugar instead of corn syrup as a sweetener. Nat wa happy when she found Mexican (made in Mexico) Coke for sale in Sam's Club. The laws dictate the use of sugar in Mexico. Not 100% sure why. Must have something to do with subsidies and protectionism. Regardless, Pepsi has done what companies should do. They started making something that their customers want. More companies and indeed industries could learn from Pepsi's lead.

RIAA and the music industry insists on sewing people to make them buy their products instead of altering their offerings to match what people want to buy. They were so slow at it that cottage industries have grown up to answer the call and provide services and products without so much as offering 90% to the music companies for permission to make a dime themselves. These folks should look up the word capitalism before condemning each other.

The web page for Pepsi and Coke are chucked full of Flash. It is a troubled method of presenting cool stuff. The mechanism is a disaster. The little bit I've worked in Flash I was amazed how muchs stress was put on the system to make a ball bounce around. The OS doesn't seem to matter. There is something inharrently wong with Flash across the board.  Linux Flash doesn't work most of the time. I have better luck running the windows version of Firefox with flash installed under Wine. That tells me that it is Flash's fault that it sucks and not Linux.

People in charge of selling things seem to think that colorfull, shiny, noisy pages are better than content for getting the message across. The message is "buy our products." so what is there to tell me that I don't know by the time I go to your site? Give me some frigging content. Coke even has some forum heavy on graphics and gizmoes that they call a web 2.0 social network. That page can be shut down with the wave of a pen. I would not want to be tied to it.

All of the capitalist world is missing the point. It isn't glitz. It is information. If you don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation, shut up and let people buy your products.