B&O: Bonkers & Out-of-touch
Comments: 25
I tried to visit the Bang & Olufsen site today and received this message:
Hard to believe, isn’t it – I mean, how moronic can you get? I’m assuming they had their site professionally made and can only wonder how on earth any developer ever got this past a client. Just astonishing.
Or maybe Microsoft owns them now…?
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.11.17 (Sun) • 18:39
Comments
Posted by Matthew Maber 2002.11.17, 22:23
is there contact at B&O to hassle?
I never liked B&O stuff much anyway, too much style over usability, not like apple.
Posted by jh 2002.11.17, 22:48
B&O’s gear is apparently not much more than stylishly repackaged Philips components, or so I’ve heard. You spend your money on attractive furniture rather than superior-quality audio (my own ears told me this part).
I wasn’t interested in buying anything from them — I was just following a Metafilter thread on the new Shure headphones and wanted to compare with B&O’s offerings. Unfortunately I won’t be buying the Shure’s, not at $500 a pop.
I’m also not interested in hassling B&O about their site; I’ll just not go there. It’s such a glaringly stupid thing to do that if they want to go and shoot themselves in the foot, I’m happy to stand by and watch. You’re right though that without feedback they may not realise the extent of their cretinism.
Posted by Mike 2002.11.18, 00:32
I actually opened IE (ack!) just to look at this. The site is so simple and “boxy” that it could easily be translated to XHTML.
Maybe someone with too much time on their hands will make a standards compliant version of B&O.
What were they thinking?
Posted by sasha 2002.11.18, 01:28
Why are you surprised? I have a client (lead sales guy at an ISP) I work with that has made it clear to me that he seriously doesn’t care if other browsers can view their site correctly, as long as he can see it ok in IE 6.0 (browser he uses) and that search engines can index it. He’s one of those bleating sheep that believes M$ is the best.
Posted by tomas 2002.11.18, 02:30
Wether “M$” is the best or not is irrelevant, in fact, calling them “M$” is about as productive as calling your political opposition “idiotarians”.
Posted by Mary Beth 2002.11.18, 04:00
Whoa. How un-web-like is that? Silly morons. I am always having to explain to little-experienced computer and net users that it’s not alway their fault that they can’t get a page to open. Sometimes it’s the stupidity of the so-called web designers who can’t get it that the web should be cross-platform, cross-browser blah blah blah.
this is like putting out a catalogue and having all the descriptions in some ancient language. Oh, you can’t read it? too bad! Only worse - here the ancient language is written in invisible ink so you can’t even see if you can translate it.
Posted by Mary Beth 2002.11.18, 04:23
Interestingly enough both the info-management company and the design company that did their site have web sites that work fine in chimera. How strange.
Being up for a silly harangue, I sent an email ( beoinfo1@bang-olufsen.dk ) and a full screen shot of the message you get on another browser to them. As you say - if no one tells them, how can they know?
http://www.cellnetwork.dk/
http://www.synkron.com/sw3414.asp#516_7968
Posted by resonance 2002.11.18, 04:41
Sadly, I wonder if telling them that their website is only accessible via a Microsoft product will do any good. Even though just about everyone I know (academics and designers) uses a Mac and a non-Microsoft browser, IE6 traffic still accounts for roughly 87% of traffic to my site.
What we really should tell them is that many of those who use non-IE browsers use them because they’re discriminating about the software they use. There’s probably a pretty decent overlap between such users and users that B&O hopes are discriminating about their audio equipment.
That said, count me among those who think B&O equipment is crap. The sliding glass and metal parts and glass touchscreen control panel novelties wear off very quickly. Making good speakers still comes down to being able to move air, and though I’ve looked up and down and all over, I haven’t found anything that beats a good cabinet for audio quality. Ribbon speakers come close, but I’d still rather have a good set of ported cabs.
For non-studio use, I’m a big fan of Castle Acousticsspeakers. Forget the fact they’re wonderful to look at; it’s all about the sound, and the sound to price ratio has never ceased to amaze me.
Posted by eric 2002.11.18, 10:53
I popped their customer service department a slightly nasty message about it and they responded in about 10 minutes and said they would look into it. We’ll see what happens eh?
Posted by jh 2002.11.18, 17:25
Resonance — Excellent point about audience overlap (actual audio quality aside).
To those who contacted B&O — good luck! I’m interested in hearing any responses (or rationalisations) they may provide. If you get e-mail from them, check the header to see which mail app they used. Send a message back saying they have to use Eudora or Mail.app if they want to write to you. It’s a laugh riot!
Posted by Matthew Maber 2002.11.18, 23:00
i sent a screen shot to them just saying how disgusted i was.
no reply yet
Posted by robb 2002.11.19, 01:08
If your using Omni on OS X you can go to “preferences - compatibility” and set the browser to identify itself as IE to get past the M$ gatekeeper. I always change it back to Omni immediately as soon as I get past the opening page.
Posted by Adam Rice 2002.11.19, 01:15
The online-banking system at my bank (citibank) is a little less awful, but weirder in some ways about their browser policy.
Although they don’t say so explicitly, they have a list of browsers that they’ll let access their website. Chimera and Mozilla (among others) are not on the list. Netscape and Explorer are. They officially recommend Explorer 5.0 and Netscape 4.79 (I am shaking my head in amazement with you). What’s weird and frustrating is they have a browser test, leading one to suppose (erroneously) that if your browser passes the test, it should be able to access the site. The test checks for Javascript support and encryption. Most browsers will pass it, but will still get booted out.
Yes, I’ve tried contacting customer service about this. They send back a bland reply that suggests they barely read my note before pasting in a standardized response.
Grr.
Posted by Dave Neal 2002.11.21, 02:35
I actually do use IE and opened the site without incident. Unfortunately, this didn’t help much. It took me almost a full minute to figure out the seemingly inoperative “Go” button, and another minute or two to figure out how to use it to navigate. I honestly expected to be unimpressed, but left being quite disgusted with their overall design structure. Someone is getting paid way too much to learn flash on their time.
Posted by iM 2002.11.22, 08:41
If I were to take B&O’s browser fussiness and apply it to my site, I would effectively ban 27% of my viewers. Hmmm…..not good.
Posted by Mary Beth 2002.11.22, 11:42
OK, so here you go - right from B&O:
From: “beoinfo1” beoinfo1@bang-olufsen.dk Date: Thu Nov 21, 2002 5:15:51 PM America/NewYork To: Mary Beth Goodman mbgoodman@mac.com Subject: Re: Your web site Attachments: There is 1 attachment
Dear Ms. Goodman,
Thank you for your e-mail of 17th November.
We are sorry to learn that you experience problems in entering our website because we only support Internet Explorer. We regret if this causes problem to some customers. However, so far we have chosen only to support Internet Explorer from version 5.0 for MAC OS and from version 5.5 for Windows.
I have passed a copy of your e-mail on to the responsible department for their information and consideration.
Yours sincerely Bang & Olufsen a/s
Helle Pramanik Customer Service
This email and any attachments contain confidential and/or privileged information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. Please notify the sender and delete this message if you are not the intended recipient or if you have received this email by an error. Any copying, disclosure or distribution of this message or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.
Posted by eric 2002.11.25, 12:23
I got the same response from Mary Beth. Of course I’m writing them back to ask why they would forgo the 5-6% of the most affluent customers when it wouldn’t cost them any extra money to support them.
Posted by Mr Bang 2003.03.25, 02:07
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Posted by Mr olufsen 2003.03.28, 19:57
Meh… Mr Bang they aret entitiled to their opinion no mitter hoo anoraky it is my clever little engineer!
what a joke! this messages have been formulating since 2002 and we are now going into 2004. were are the standards?
I agree with whole 2004 2002 thing
Posted by Aussie 2004.01.10, 13:22
It hasn’t changed. After waiting an eternity for download I find out they sell things, thats about it. If you inadvertantly click a country link ie Australia, you’ll wait even longer to find out they sell things.
Posted by GL 2005.05.04, 20:56
I have been looking at Bang and Olufsen sites using Mzilla for ages (I looked at it tonight). and hae never had a problem. Maybe its localised to an ISP or something.
Posted by Alli 2006.04.19, 04:08
B&O has it’s own market. Their stuff makes some great sounds, although some products are much better than others (their top speakers are amazing). Obviously their website is not one of the best. I didn’t have any problems with it though, Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, none of them had any problems running it…
Posted by Tashi 2006.07.07, 11:42
Wow! This is a superbly passionate discussion. I found this site through google as part of my research of B&O products. So far I have gathered from all of your point of views, that there is no point buying the cheaper products made by B&O? Can I stick to good old Sony or LG?
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