The exit of Bill Gates...
The other day, I was desperately seeking information on the schedule and availability of tickets for a movie. I thought, checking the schedules on my iPhone would be better than calling the theater number (and then waiting in a long queue for someone to even pick up the phone). After all, iPhone features a full fledged web-browser!
Searched on Google for the web address of the theaters and as usual, the results page loaded extremely fast, about 0.16 second for the query and about 7-10 secs for the full page to load (incidentally the mobile version of Google home page takes much longer to load).
Then went on to individual Websites...
Adlabs Cinemas (Rating - 1/2 star): Even the low bandwidth version takes extremely long to load. The drop down selection doesn't work. Very mobile unfriendly with heavy use of images. The only saving grace, I got the phone numbers of the theater call center!
Inox Movies (Rating - 1/2star): Again very mobile unfriendly. Heavy use of Flash (with no back up images) which doesn't load on the phone and also heavy use of images. Adlabs, at least had a phone number on the first page, on this site, you have to guess that 'insta tickets' means/will have more details of Phone numbers! Anyways, found the movie, selected it and 3 page loads later its a dead end - application error! Complete waste of time.
PVR Cinemas (Rating 0 Star): First load - Server error! Second load, the initial screen for selecting cities - What's with those huge square boxes before the city name? Select city, next page load, server error! I am not going to try anything more on this site.
Cinemax (Rating 1/2 Star): The page takes ages to load! Layout is extremely bad. Luckily, I spot the registration link, refrain myself from even searching as I guess that even listing movies will require me to login (which is true!). Saving grace - phone numbers on top.
Fame (Rating 1/2 Star): Graphics heavy. A flash image has the phone numbers, which cannot be seen on the iPhone. Could find the movie timings at the least.
Overall, futile 15 mins spent. I had a phone, so probably should have called them and wasted 15 mins instead to get info as per my requirement.
I am pretty sure its the same on any (smart)phone with any type of browser. Infact, I don't think they should be rated at all. The fact that I could atleast get the theater phone numbers was the saving grace which I could have got from the Google search results page itself with a proper search query!
A couple of years back, I remember sitting in the Google Mumbai office and talking to the head of Marketing of Google India on what TG they should target for faster adoption of its GMail offering. Then, without batting an eyelid, I said 'Youth'. If the same question were asked to me now, the answer would be the same but with a few more caveats and sentences thrown in.
A few months after that discussion (or probably a year), AOL India launched its own mail platform, and looking at the TVC's it was pretty obvious they were targeting the same set we had talked about.
Orkut I thought, went a step ahead and changed when it changed its logo when it was given an Youth icon award by MTV. Now, they have added an app called Sony Ericsson MTV Roadies Battleground. I am not averse to having 3rd party apps on Orkut, some of them I think are exceptional. What turns me off in the above app is the blatant branding (where are adversitement/sponsored link text next to this banner??) and use of words 'powered by orkut'. Did I say that the logo looks like it is a new product from Mozilla.
What I foresee happening is that the Google India team in its quest of getting higher user and activity numbers is targeting the Youth with extremely shoddy short term marketing partnerships and strategies.
These youth might not be what the marketers advertising on Orkut are targeting in the first place. And then, the bigger issue which will happen according to me is the mass migration of Orkut users to other niche social networks depending on their needs.
A few days back they have launched a new iPhone vetsion of the Reader (www.google.com/mobile/i). Reading feeds on the phone has never been better. However, I miss
the earlier functionality of launching links in a new page using GWT to strip the page of heavy graphics and formating to load quickly on mobile.
Posts
