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This is a product demo that I recently created for my employer, BlueTie. Since my Mom isn’t really quite sure what I do for a living, I thought I’d post this little demo with an explanation of what BlueTie does.

BlueTie is a fully-featured hosted email, calendaring and collaboration solution for businesses of all sizes. We offer 10GB business email (with 25MB attachments), shared calendars, contacts and file management, task management, instant messaging, and integrated spam and virus protection. Oh, and we also have live phone and email customer support (not that you’ll need it, since it’s so easy to use).

Companies who use BlueTie can private label the application with their own corporate look-and-feel and use their own domain name (e.g. You@YourDomain.com). It’s like Outlook and Hosted Exchange, except it’s Web-based so you have anywhere, anytime access to all of your critical data (at a fraction of the cost). It’s sold on the (SaaS) Software as a Service model, which means users simply pay a small monthly subscription fee and BlueTie handles all of the backups, upgrades, spam and virus control, and network management. We have a little over 2 million users using our software, just to give you a scope of how big we are (and how popular it is).

But that’s just BlueTie’s flagship product. We’re developing lots of other cool and innovative stuff and have two game-changing product announcements that will happen within the next few months. Stay tuned.

I’m a marketing and advertising guy. I also read Inc. Magazine every month, and every month I see and pay attention to those quirky, simple little ads for Ketel One Vodka. Effective advertising, apparently…as today I purchased my first bottle of Ketel One and just moments ago poured one of the better tasting martinis that I’ve had in a long long time.

Too bad their website sucks.

The entire site is designed in flash (not necessarily a bad thing when done correctly). It opens a new window (without my permission), overtaking all available screen real estate (I have other things that I’m working on, Mr. Nolet, don’t disrupt my workspace, please.). It also disables the status bar on the browser window (Is the site loading? Where does this link go?), and it removes the bookmark toolbar (I drag my favorite sites into the very toolbar that you just disabled. Too bad for you, Ketel.). Worst of all, it removes the navigation toolbar, effectively holding the visitor hostage, since they now no longer have access to the home button, the back button, or any other way to type a new URL and go somewhere else.

But that’s not why I am annoyed. I am annoyed because the videos won’t load.

I mean, after all that aggravation, turns out that the damn site is broken. I mean broken broken…it doesn’t work in FireFox, Safari or Camino, I tried them all, both on my MacBook and my turbo charged G5 desktop. (Yes, that single tasty martini turned me into *that* kind of passionate consumer and fan…I *really* wanted to experience more of the Ketel brand and watch those videos.) But I was left sitting there like *I* did something wrong. It took me ten minutes of screwing around to convince myself that it was KetelOne.com that was the problem, and not me.

Anyway, I abandoned the site, I gave up.

I have to say, though, that even though the website left a bad taste in my mouth, the vodka is still pretty wonderful. I might even buy it again.

EDIT: Turns out that the videos do work on a PC. The Ketel people apparently just don’t like Apple users, that’s all. BTW, that’s like saying, “Go Away” to almost 10% of your online visitors. And no, given the new opportunity to view their videos on a PC, I declined.

Dear Ketel, embed your videos in flash, so everyone can enjoy them.