I’m sorry if I begin this blog sounding like Victor Meldrew (although I probably begin every blog sounding like Victor Meldrew), but why do companies always have to change things? Having once studied a Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification, I’ve already heard all the clichéd if-you’re-standing-still-you’re-going-backwards arguments, but seriously. If something works, and is popular, and doesn’t generate any complaints, why do companies absolutely insist on making things worse in the name of “progress”?
I regularly use a 3D satellite mapping system for viewing towns and streets. I only started using it when my previous 3D satellite mapping system inexplicably closed down a few Christmases ago. Until recently, my new provider delivered a fascinating birds-eye view of anywhere I wanted to look at, but then for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever, the hosting site increased the size of the overlaid street names to such a ludicrous degree that roughly half the map is now covered in said street names. Entire terraces have been obscured from view by gigantic letters and white stripes that are meant to demarcate the roadway but don’t, because they aren’t in the right place, and therefore cover up the very buildings you went onto the site to look at in the first place. According to this “improved” display, St Vincent Street in Glasgow has become St Vincent Lane, and you can’t see either of them because the sodding lines and letters are so monstrous. I won’t name the company responsible for this omnishambles, but you can find them on Bing. Because they are.
For another example of what I’m on about, look no further than Twitter. As an avid tweeter (Tweeter? Twitterer? Twat?), I use the Twitter app on my lovely new smartphone all the time. Sadly, a few weeks ago it updated itself automatically, without even asking permission (which my phone is always supposed to) and instantly became far less enjoyable. My profile page now regularly fails to display, with a small grey circle endlessly rotating as it fruitlessly attempts to load a thumbnail photo and six short lines of text, and when it does load, it'll display some total nonsense - today it claims I only have 130 Twitter followers, which is some way short of the mark. On every page of the app, the fonts have transmogrified from a neat sans-serif into horrid spidery lettering that is really rather unpleasant to look at. Can I roll back to a previous version? Of course I can’t. I’m stuck with it. Because some dickhead at Twitter’s app division somehow got it into his or her stupid thick skull that this change represented an improvement.
We see this all the time with products and services. Remember New Coke? Thought not – it was considerably inferior to Old Coke, so Coke swiftly brought Old Coke back as Coke Classic, and eventually replaced the replacement, so the New New Coke was actually Old Coke, henceforth simply known as Coke. A decade ago, Citroen made a rather attractive car called the Xsara, but when the inevitable mid-life facelift came along, they replaced its understated elegance with a horrid new front end that resembled a depressed frog. Particularly in green, which mine unfortunately was. I called it Froggy, and not because it was French – it was just bloody ugly, with a face that could give small children nightmares.
Perhaps I’m out of step with the modern world, but I am a firm fan of consistency. I like knowing that tomorrow will be the same as today, I buy cornflakes because they’re dependably tasty, and I take reassurance in things like the Sports Report music on Five Live every Saturday teatime, which is the same music my grandfather used to listen to before throwing his pools coupon into the bin as fortune eluded him for yet another week. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Luddite – in fact, I love to see new products reaching the market and improving our lives. However, I really resent the constant tinkering with the things we’ve already got, especially when these “improvements” always seem to make the objects in question a little bit worse somehow.
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