America-centricity Again (part whatever)
Oooh, here's an annoying one.
Pop over to the main Adobe website.
Imagine, for a moment, that you're visiting from Canada.
One of the first things you'll notice, after the pretty little flower animation, is that drop down box at the top right of the page.
"Ah ha!" you'll think. "A little widget to select which country I'm in - how splendidly thoughtful of those nice Adobe chaps."
Now try selecting Canada from the list. Go on, I'll wait...
See?
Bastardly bastarding bastards. This is actually worse than the issue of US-dominance Gary Turner memorably ranted about in his DropDownUSA post a couple of years ago.
Bad enough that they break the alphabetical order of the drop down list to put the US at the top, but now they're telling Canucks - "hey, you might as well be in the States anyway, so what the heck."
And here's the kicker for Adobe: the only reason I went to their site was that I was looking to purchase a full copy of Acrobat (the version that lets you produce your own PDFs). I was so tweaked by the stupidity of this tiny UI faux pas, that I shut down the browser in a fit of pique. Stuff it.
I know I'll have to pony up my US$449 eventually, but I'll be feeling even less happy about it now that I know I'm going to face a layer of insult on top of the injury to my wallet.
And to think I met that John Warnock bloke once when he was thinking about buying the company I worked for. Seemed like such a nice man.
