3 ms·

In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users into some other part of the site that

In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users into some other part of the site that nobody currently uses because it's not as good.

craftinator 7y ago
Bingo.
tialaramex 7y ago
Not necessarily sales/ marketing, but an Old Thing is not a new thing you'll be praised for, it's just another annoying cost that comes out of your budget. Maintenance is boring. Building a New Thing comes with excitement and praise. Microsoft has done this so long their own people strongly recommend using URLs in https://aka.ms/ https://aka.ms/ their long term link maintenance software, so that when yet another "exciting" change happens to their entire Microsoft web site you can still find all the vital documentation. Maybe their "Knowledge base" articles for example, will become a Wiki again, and then a social networking site, and then a blog the week after, and then a different Wiki with newly inscrutable URLs. But the aka.ms link can be updated so that you don't need to spend an hour navigating. The more important maintenance becomes to a company's actual financial health the more senior management rebel and become sure their destiny is to radically reinvent the company. If directors did their actual job (working for the shareholders, for whom "exciting" aka "massively loss making" isn't the goal) the very next thing you'd hear after the CEO announcing the company has a new name, new branding, new logo, would be the Chairman arriving to tell everybody actually it's not a new name, new branding or new logo, just a new CEO, sorry, no big leaving do he was escorted off site by security.
hnzix 7y ago
Some marketing people cannot grok user-generated content and absolutely freak out over the perceived lack of control. It's completely irrational but I've had pinhead marketing droids kill my content before with no replacement plan. It's infuriating.
nikanj 7y ago
"Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.

craftinator 7y ago

Bingo.

tialaramex 7y ago

Not necessarily sales/ marketing, but an Old Thing is not a new thing you'll be praised for, it's just another annoying cost that comes out of your budget. Maintenance is boring. Building a New Thing comes with excitement and praise. Microsoft has done this so long their own people strongly recommend using URLs in https://aka.ms/ https://aka.ms/ their long term link maintenance software, so that when yet another "exciting" change happens to their entire Microsoft web site you can still find all the vital documentation. Maybe their "Knowledge base" articles for example, will become a Wiki again, and then a social networking site, and then a blog the week after, and then a different Wiki with newly inscrutable URLs. But the aka.ms link can be updated so that you don't need to spend an hour navigating. The more important maintenance becomes to a company's actual financial health the more senior management rebel and become sure their destiny is to radically reinvent the company. If directors did their actual job (working for the shareholders, for whom "exciting" aka "massively loss making" isn't the goal) the very next thing you'd hear after the CEO announcing the company has a new name, new branding, new logo, would be the Chairman arriving to tell everybody actually it's not a new name, new branding or new logo, just a new CEO, sorry, no big leaving do he was escorted off site by security.

hnzix 7y ago

Some marketing people cannot grok user-generated content and absolutely freak out over the perceived lack of control. It's completely irrational but I've had pinhead marketing droids kill my content before with no replacement plan. It's infuriating.

nikanj 7y ago

"Your bonuses are tied to the amount of traffic your blog posts generate" is such a 2020s KPI. And I've heard of more than one person whose compensation package has those metrics.