Hasta La Ideas

This makes no sense to me, but perhaps you academic types can draw something from it. Web design, development and marketing firm Boston Interactive has put up a website called buggy-whips.com, which looks like a lame April Fool’s gag two weeks too late. The faux website purports to sell buggy whips–you know, those things for driving horses onward–and has ripped off Apple’s website design to do it. Their explanation:

The buggy whip is commonly known as an analogy of businesses disrupted by innovation. It is often cited in business cases as one of the industries that did not adapt with the advent of the automobile, and thus began the demise of the buggy whip industry. The roots of the analogy can be traced to Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor.

In the web design industry we often hear about the superiority and creativity of the Apple website. Functionally, there is no technical innovation or advanced features. It is a simple wrapper with sexy, eye popping product photography, yet somehow it works. So we decided to compose an experiment to test its viability. We took a product that has been considered virtually obsolete for over 90 years and built a website using a simple, apple-istic wrapper to promote it.

Boston Interactive is calling it a “cognitive social acceptance experiment.” Uh, good luck with that, guys.

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