Years ago, in the early days of website design, a friend and I trekked into Manhattan to attend a Verizon event. Verizon’s marketing geniuses- some of whom must have stayed up very late concocting this idea- had devised a program whereby they would refer clients to designers (who paid Verizon a percentage for the referral) in return for a kickback, I mean percentage, when the client signed on to host their site on Verizon’s servers. You can guess who came out on the winning end of that deal.
That wasn’t the kicker though. Imagine a room filled with designers…99% of whom worked on Macs at that time. After this long presentation, it came out that to upload the web files you would have to use Front Page, which at that time was strictly a windows based software package. I raised my hand. “Isn’t Front Page only made for PCs?” "Yes," was the reply. “But at the rates you guys are getting for web design, you can all afford to go out and buy a PC for uploading to our servers.” I swear to you this is what he said. At that point, the other 99% of attendees joined me in getting up to leave, over the desperate cries of the presenter promising us all nifty mouse pads if only we signed up.
This blog post- and a bad taste in my mouth- was all I got out of that day's adventures.
That wasn’t the kicker though. Imagine a room filled with designers…99% of whom worked on Macs at that time. After this long presentation, it came out that to upload the web files you would have to use Front Page, which at that time was strictly a windows based software package. I raised my hand. “Isn’t Front Page only made for PCs?” "Yes," was the reply. “But at the rates you guys are getting for web design, you can all afford to go out and buy a PC for uploading to our servers.” I swear to you this is what he said. At that point, the other 99% of attendees joined me in getting up to leave, over the desperate cries of the presenter promising us all nifty mouse pads if only we signed up.
This blog post- and a bad taste in my mouth- was all I got out of that day's adventures.
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I would have like to have been a fly on the wall for that. Well done!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree it was poorly handled by Verizon I do think if you are doing web design you really should have a PC for testing as so much of your audience is on a PC and browser compatibility is so important. And now you really need a few smartphones and tablets to test on as well.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree Neil, and I do have a pc specifically for this purpose, (and a tablet, etc.) but we are talking the very first days of web design, when there wasn't the abundance of browsers and platforms that there are now.
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