By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

Quality, Monopolies and Consumer Rights

I recently received a headline in my mailbox: "1.5 Million Web Pages Born Daily, According to Alexa Internet." Now I don’t know if that is true or not. It might actually be higher. Kind of depends on what you consider a Web Page.

If a site is mostly just a fancy catalog site and each page is different, its content dependent upon what a user asks for, is each lookup a separate page?

What about a search engine like AltaVista, where a million separate requests occur simultaneously?

These are really philosophical questions and something that can be debated in a class or over a few beers at Cool Beans. What I really want to talk about this month is quality, monopolies and consumer rights.

The Web has grown at an amazing rate. The number of different ways you can now create a Web page is staggering and I am happy for it. For the first time, I think that we might actually be moving more towards a less-paper (notice I didn’t say "paper-less" ) workplace because of the Web. Well actually the Web, dynamic HTML and big monitors. Palm-Pilots and Palm-PCs will also help, but I have a 17" monitor at work and a 19" monitor at home. I can now read quite comfortably at the screen and have radically reduced the number of things I print out. Now I wouldn’t like to read the next Stephen King novel on the computer, but its ok for reading the reams of technical documentation I have to wade through on a daily basis.

But I digress . . .

There is a strong lack of quality in most Websites these days. It seems that folks have been on a feeding frenzy to see how fast they can put a Website without concentrating on how or why they are doing it. No one is asking themselves the questions like "can anybody make heads or tails of it" or "can someone from outside organization x, find y?".

Here at UNT we are as guilty as the next organization. This is not say we don’t work hard at it, it’s just grown so large that we have been too busy trying to keep up with the Jones’s to worry about it. I will say that I think our site is one of the better university sites. I think we are better than most university sites in the state. We probably are not as good at UT’s, but if I had the resources of UT’s Web team, we’d be more comparable than we are now.

What I do want to say is, that if you are at a Website and you think it doesn’t work, let that site know. Be specific. Say "I was trying to find out how much it costs to attend your school and I wasn’t able to find it." If you can, let them know which places you looked. If you do find what you are looking for let them know too. The most frustrating part of running an informational Website is that we usually don’t know if it’s working or not.

The next item on my list is about quality of our software. Mainly the quality of our software that comes out of a certain monopoly, Microsoft.

I will not bash Microsoft outright. That’s just too simple and it’s the "in thing to do." I think what Bill Gates has managed to do is something to be proud of. It didn’t just happen, it came from hard work, persistence and a bit o’ luck. Did he do some things that were a bit dirty? Yes. So did his competitors. It’s called business.

The problem is now nobody can compete with Microsoft. To borrow from a recent column I read, "There is no innovation, everyone is afraid that Microsoft will come in and knock them out or companies want to be bought out by somebody else."

This is our biggest threat to improving computer systems because with no competition, there is no real reason to innovate or improve service. And it is already happening. At a recent convention, Web developers asked Microsoft why you couldn’t run the 2 current versions of the Microsoft browsers, like you can Netscape (you must run both if you want to make sure everyone can see your site). Microsoft answered that you can’t, it was too hard, and well why would you want to basically.

Arrogance -- that’s my biggest problem with them now. They now know they run the show and they are going to really start sticking it too us. Of course this is called business too. Even with their "free" software this has happened. They have made minute changes to their latest browser, Internet Explorer 4, that are undetectable to most browser checks, but break in some areas of functionality (e.g. the timestamp on cookies). Arggh!

I don’t know exactly what we can do stop this madness. There really is no real competition for them. What you can do is to keep pushing for any of your software/hardware providers to improve their quality.

Speed is no longer an issue, but reliability is. If your car was as unreliable as some computer software is, you’d be pretty upset. People accept unreliable software too readily.

That includes us Web people.

Until next time.

Mark