Once upon a time I interned at Hewlett Packard. Toward the end of my stay there, the company split in two with the HP moniker going to the public facing PC, printer, scanner market; and the companies foundation of testing and medical equipment was renamed Agilent. New logo, new name, and new attitude, or so we were told.

Once upon a yesterday I was talking to my current boss about our company’s new logo and how much it reminded me of Agilent’s logo.

With the tender memories all afresh, I decided to pay the old neighborhood a visit. A quick google search took me to a site that I was quite sure was not the official Agilent site. Oh, but I was wrong. It IS the official Agilent site. This horrible mash of text links; slow loading and slower reading; is in fact the face that Agilent offers the world. “Hey! Look at us! We suck at making web sites, but our network testing tools are great!”

And don’t make the mistake I did and try out the Japanese version of the site. It seems they set a cookie (or fortune cookie) on your browser and after you load the page with all the squiggle marks instead of letters, you CAN’t GET OUT! Their home page reads the cookie and says, “Oh, you silly user. You meant to go to the Japanese site! Here let me take you there without asking.”

GAH!! How does a billion-dollar company end up with a web site that looks like it was done by a college intern?! Oh yeah… here come those tender memories again.