I wanted to write about silly car (sub brand) names today and thought it would be a good idea to go online to check out the latest nonsense.

I started with Mistubishi, the company that came up with the one el Galant, or was that Mazda? I have no way of finding out online, at least not from Mitsubishi, because Mistubishi won’t show me anything at all unless I first download and install the latest version of something called Adobe Flash.

I looked around to see if there was a no-Flash alternate Mitsubishi site. Nope. So to hell with them. For starters, I don’t download stuff, especially stuff that ends in .exe. I have two other laptops and they have Flash. I don’t know why this one doesn’t and I don’t care. I don’t want to spend time downloading stuff. I just want to get some info and move on. Plus, I know that anything requiring Flash is going to be a TV commercial, not an info source. Adios Mitsubishi.

So I went to Toyota. Same. Sayonara Toyota. Ditto Kia and Hyundai.

Guys, listen to me, please. People who want to sell things to other people don’t do this. They give people options. In this case, you might offer: 1) do you want to get information about buying our products then click here or 2) do you want to see something in Flash, in which case you click here. That way everyone’s happy and some of them, such as yours truly, aren’t irritated. And if they track visits to their sites, they can eventually get rid of Flash

Let’s see what Honda does. Well, I’ll be darned, I got in right away. Let’s look at Mazda. Bingo, right in. These guys must have hired the 4.0 kids from marketing school – the kind who give orders to IT – while Toyota and Mitsubishi got stuck with the kids who took shop, now known as computer science, who think they should be giving orders to marketing people.

I wasn’t going to check GM, Ford and Chrysler because as far as I know they don’t give their cars silly names. But now I have to. Guess what? My browser slid right in to all three, NFR, No Flash Required.