The Island of Misfit Toybox

I used to bitch and moan that Upper Managment never wanted to spend time/money on R&D for new products or improvements to the products we used daily.

I was half right.

Time and Money aplenty were spent on new products all the time -- once they were sold and we were under a complete and crazy time crunch. There's no time like making a brand new product when you're under the gun to get it out the door and improvements/user concerns be damned.

The best part about all of this time/money spending came when we were making products that could/should be re-used with ease but would never get sold a second time and, thus, sat on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust.

And then there are products that were researched and developed only to never be used. For two years I heard that we'd be switching over to "all Flash promotions" and that HTML was an antiquated humbug. Well... I just clicked on a dozen random links only to not find neither an all-Flash promotion nor any Flash element in any page to which I went. "Wha-Happened?"

The other thing that I love is that the person who replaced me had these huge dreams of adding DHTML/JS (think Proto AJAX) items to the pages to add a lot more "zing" and "pop". I didn't see any of those either.