Jason Wolf, Natalie Zee
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By: Mcgraw-Hill
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22
Average rating: 3.5 of 5
I want my money back 1 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.
The Last Mile was written by two former Shockwave employees, now with March First's interactive division. Let me start by stating that I consider March First one of the few interactive agencies that truly "get it." However, after reading The Last Mile, its obvious that someone at March First should start reviewing books before they go to press with their name attached. For starters, the writing in this book is extremely poor. For example, this excerpt regarding the complications involved with DSL installations; "The next day a real service guy showed up, wearing an open shirt with the gold chains and a serious leather tool belt that the customer said looked like the one he had bought because he just loved his job so much (huh?). The customer thought to himself "this is the man." He looked as if he was ready to start a fight with anyone that talked bad about DSL. This guy came in like Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek movie and rewired the warp drive engine. He rewired the setup and told the customer that he was ready to make the jump to light speed." The passage rambles on (including run on sentences, and grammatical errors) and concludes with; "He thought of some technical reason as to why this might be normal and forgot about it, until he asked his wife if she ever tried using both her DSL and Powerbook modem. "Yup, all the time," she said. For the love of God, he thought"PLEASE - who is the target audience of this book? CEO's interested in understanding broadband capabilities and positioning their business for the broadband revolution don't want to read writing in the style of "Spot goes to the Park".
The Last Mile also (conveniently) features a case study on Shockwave.com - although I find the site entertaining, how this fits into helping CEOs to understand business applications based on broadband is beyond me. (It's also nice to see that the book gets kudos from the creative officer of Shockwave.com)
The book continuously repeats itself (obviously written by two different writers with no editor) and jumps around; confusing the reader as to what is the message of each chapter.
The Last Mile is mainly geared towards justifying the need for interactive designers (coincidentally the writers' are interactive designers) and using interactive elements such as video and flash animation because the bandwidth will be available.
When developing strategies around positioning businesses online, interactive elements should be only used if they make sense to the target audience and are necessary to help solve business problems; not simply because the technology is available. This is never mentioned in the book.
I was extremely disappointed with the unprofessional approach taken in writing (and editing) this book. The Last Mile book was painful to get through. I hope someone at March First is reading this. I want my money back.
Editorial Review:
This work discusses the impact of broadband in non-technical terms. It explains how broadband works and how it will affect you, your company and the world around you. It identifies opportunities in the market due to the evolution of broadband that individuals and companies can take advantage of.
