Saturday, April 19, 2008

Insanely bad decisions - the Dilbert example - and a wise correction

The primary Dilbert web site has gone to Flash. It doesn't work on Camino or the iPhone, and it's a mess on Firefox 3 (true, that's beta).

I assume Adobe paid United Media to do this.

The move has not been well received. Happily, there's an alternative non-flash link ...

Slashdot | Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt

... Good thing you can still get your Dilbert fix at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/ [unitedmedia.com]...

I'll change the link on our family news page to the non-Flash version.

This move deserves a Dilbert cartoon, but I don't think Scott Adams is going to satirize his own syndicate. He's a pretty careful businessman, despite the Dilbert persona.

Update 4/24/2008: United Media now redirects the archive to the Flash page. I sure hope Adobe is having to pay a lot for this! On the other hand Scott Adams has felt our wrath. A "plain" page is pending, and the RSS feed will show the strips chronologically without Flash.

Update 5/2/2008: A good solution, I've updated our news page to use it.

From Scott Adams blog:

.... if you promise to keep it to yourselves, we created a stripped-down Dilbert page with just the comic, some text navigation, and the archive: www.dilbert.com/fast. This alternate site is a minor secret, mentioned only here and in the text footnote to the regular site as “Linux/Unix.”

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