I’m not mentioning any names, but …

I was looking for a program to try out. There was a free trial version available. It was a large company’s site, one you’re probably familiar with. So …

I found the link via Google – a method many, many people use. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who came to the page this way.

OK … so to download it I have to register – the usual email and create a password thing. I do this. Only one step left and I can download the trial version. The next step? They wanna collect a bunch of info on me. Brilliant.

Several things struck me when I got to this information collecting page. First, while I dislike giving out this kind of information, there is some I will give up under certain circumstances – depending on the company. Here, they wanted address, occupation, job title and so on. I don’t give out my address. If forced to (as in this case) I give them someone else’s address. Sometimes it’s an old address of mine from another city, sometimes it’s the address of a company (any company) I locate online. But I never give my address. Because I was irked by this question, I also gave them “tennis star” as my occupation.

Surely I’m not the only person who gives out bogus information in order to get past these idiotic pages. So the question becomes: why collect information that you cannot be sure is accurate? What good is a database of false information?

The second thing that struck me was also part of this address business. For country, they had a dropdown. How many countries were in the dropdown? One. United States.

Could someone explain to me why that field was even there? If only someone in U.S. can fill this out, do you really need a dropdown? And if you’re going to do something as silly as this, should you not have a note somewhere saying “U.S. citizens only” before people start filling out this stupid thing? Remember – I found the link via Google. The world uses Google.

Better still, read the IP address and send people to pages appropriate to their country, or provide a page indicating links for other countries. Do they know how idiotic a dropdown is that contains only one option?

The end result: I wasted time on this ill-conceived marketing fiasco, I’m more than slightly irritated with the company and I am not trying, nor will I ever try (much less buy) the program I was interested in. I mean, how good could it be when the company that makes it has a Web site like this?

Any guesses on what company I’m referring to? Chances are, you’ll be right.