From fork-admin@xent.com Mon Sep 30 13:52:48 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.spamassassin.taint.org Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DA7FD16F7F for ; Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:48:41 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Mon, 30 Sep 2002 13:48:41 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g8SFTFg31942 for ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 16:29:15 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 55A982940A8; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:25:10 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org Received: from mta7.pltn13.pbi.net (mta7.pltn13.pbi.net [64.164.98.8]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 387922940A6 for ; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:24:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from endeavors.com ([66.126.120.174]) by mta7.pltn13.pbi.net (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.1 (built May 7 2001)) with ESMTP id <0H35003JGMYX9G@mta7.pltn13.pbi.net> for fork@xent.com; Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:28:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Gregory Alan Bolcer Subject: EBusiness Webforms: cluetrain has left the station To: FoRK Reply-To: gbolcer@endeavors.com Message-Id: <3D95C839.8E8701FD@endeavors.com> Organization: Endeavors Technology, Inc. MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.79 [en] (X11; U; IRIX 6.5 IP32) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Accept-Language: en, pdf Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@spamassassin.taint.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2002 08:18:17 -0700 What's wrong with doing business over the Web? Web forms. There's promising replacements forms, but this is the current state of the industry: o You find something that you want to fill out. It's a partnership form, a signup for a Web seminar, a request for more information, anything. o You start wasting time typing in all those stupid fields and spend about 10 minutes going through all their stupid qualification hoops just to get a small piece of information , whitepaper, or a callback when halfway through, you start to wonder if it's really worth your time to forever be stuck on their stupid prospect list. o Pull down tags are never put in order of use instead of alphabetized. I was on a site just now that had every single country in the world listed; the selection of your country was absolutely critical for you to hit submit, but due to the layout, the "more>" tag on the second row was offscreen so it was impossible to select any country except about two dozen third world countries. o Even worse, ever time you hit submit, all forms based things complain about using the universal country phone number format and will cause you to re-enter dashes instead of dots. o When you get something that's not entered right, you will go back and enter it right, but then some other field or most likely pulldown will automatically get reset to the default value so that you will have to go back and resent that freaking thing too. Finally after all combinations of all pulldowns, you may get a successful submit. o You wait freaking forever just to get a confirmation. o Sometimes, like today, you won't be able to ever submit anything due to it being impossible to ever submit a valid set of information that is internally non-conflicting according to whatever fhead wrote their forms submission. What's wrong with this picture? The company is screwing you by wasting your time enforcing their data collection standards on you. I'm sure there's someone in that company that would be willing to accept "US", "U.S", "USA" "United States", "U of A", "America", etc. and would know exactly which freaking country the interested party was from instead of forcing them to waste even more time playing Web form geography. I'm starting to see the light of Passport. You want more information? Hit this passport button. Voila. IE6 and Netscape 6,7 have pre-forms sutff, but I always turn it off because you never know when there's that one field that you don't want to submit to the person you are submitting to that automatically gets sent, i.e. the privacy stuff is well beyond the average user who will get screwed on privacy stuff. So, if crappy forms-based submission is the state of practice for business enablement on the Web, I can't see this whole data submission and hurry up and wait for us to get back to you business process as working all that well. Greg