Seth Godin doesn't like pull-down menus for U.S. states. He got plenty of mail from people arguing in favor of pull-down menus. And he gives them a sound thrashing:
[H]ere are the reasons, if you insist, on why pull downs for states are silly:
...
5. The biggest reason of all: half or more of all shoppping carts online are abandoned. If this happened at the supermarket, they'd be bankrupt in less than a week. This is a crisis for anyone who sells online (except for Amazon, which doesn't have this problem--because people don't have to see any of this nonsense.) instead of Dilbertly defending the engineering status quo, teams should be working around the clock to test every single thing they can to fix the problem. [Emphasis added]
"Dilberly defending the engineering status quo." That's beautiful.
And it describes situations I run into all the time. Rather than respect people's own decisions about what's best for them (Every abandoned shopping cart says, "You're not worth my time, and you don't deserve my money."), engineers and their hyper-logical counterparts are constantly defending their system, whatever it may be, and criticizing people for being too stupid to appreciate its elegance or some similar ideal quality. They want to mold people to fit their particular vision, but they fail to see that in a world of expanding choice, people will just keep on moving until they find a system that fits their own vision.
