Money can't buy love, but it can purchase the services of a competent PR agency, which may help you flag the attention of your heart's desire. Not always, though. Contrary to popular belief, no amount of whirlwind flackery and blanket advertising can forcefully reverse consumer indifference. Particularly when it comes to promoting digital products offline - you could have your URL plastered on the cover of all the major newsweeklies and still see less traffic boost than you'd enjoy from a mention on Cool Site of the Day. Project Cool, even. This may be the lesson learned by the coders at RMX Technologies, who last week released their Rush browser plug-in and saw their company receive sugarplum candy-coating in the pages of Business Week.
One can only hope RMX, whose Web image-compression technology is a competitor of sorts with Macromedia's Flash, isn't destined to experience birth defects symmetrical with the old-growth woes of SGI, the unfortunate cover subject of the same issue's "The Sad Saga of Silicon Graphics" feature. Not that the RMX are exactly poster boys for technological miracle-mongering - from the "blink"-tagged, typo-heavy splash pages of rmx.com to their underwhelming gallery, the site is more potential than essential. The tragedy is that they might not even have a shot at fair competition. A new plug-in in 1997 may as well be a crack baby, born gasping and dependent on an act of God to survive its first month of life.
When Netscape first announced their plug-ins plan, it seemed a strategy custom-crunched to please users, software developers, and Netscape shareholders: Treat Navigator like an OS, let the third-party developers do their thing, and the users could sort out the winners and the losers. But after all this time, the only arguable winners are early contenders Progressive Networks and Macromedia, and two successful products do not a platform make. Even then, it's the rare publisher that can afford to experiment with these extensions while ensuring their content is degradable for the noncompulsively upgraded mass of viewers who lever most of the Web's clickthrough.
Maybe it's simply old habits dying hard, and soon all the pages that once emblazoned herky-jerky GIF89s on their front doors will apply a fresh coat of Flash to their ramshackle walls. Maybe most publishers still lack the time and know-how to go beyond text and static images, and always will. But there's nothing more annoying than visiting a hyped site only to learn you've got a half-hour's worth of downloading and installing before you can judge it for yourself. Publishers know this, and avoid forcing suffering on the readers. Thus, the plug-in developers suffer on behalf of everybody.
If everyone migrated to Internet Explorer (somehow managing to forget everything they'd heard about security issues), ActiveX could deliver the Web from this stalemate, automatically installing components as they're needed. But everybody is smart enough to never do any one thing. And outside the pages of Business Week, developing for the plugged-in ceases to be an option, traded in favor of a more novel quagmire: to develop for Netscape or IE 4.0? And if past lessons offer any indication of future performance, the same stifling effects of fragmentation suggest it'll take more than glad-handing publicists to deliver a winning scheme.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
