Flash The Good, The Bad, The Ugly...

First The Good...

General Electric is an enormous multinational corporation; they make everything from washing machines and air conditioners to trident submarines and MRI machines. The company employs more than 300,000 workers and they are in 160 different countries. GE’s market segments include financial, infrastructure, healthcare, industrial, and media components.

With that kind of foot print one would expect their web presence to be hopelessly chaotic and difficult to navigate but, that is simply not the case. I was profoundly surprised when I was doing some design research for a solar energy companies' web site to find that GE's web sites use flash extensively and that have successfully utilized the tool to improve communication rather than doll it up with a bunch of superfluous effects.

In example, consider their Ecomagination site focused on alternative energy products and solutions. http://ge.ecomagination.com/site/index.html#home
Note: that at no point does the site lapse into some gratuitous use of flash for effect; the effects reflect and enhance the content; see how the content pages uses flash to communicate the content without overpowering it.

Now The Bad...
In order to find an example of bad flash design, I thought why limit yourself to strict definitions of what is or is not flash go to the veritable source of bad... Microsoft. After all what could be worse than bad flash designed & implemented in a poorly typed ASP 3.0 rip-off created by a suicidal inept multinational corporation hell-bent on making over blown, non-intuitive interfaces that slowly drive its user base insane?

Since I have no respect for this company I not going to dignify my charge that their site sucks by actually investigating it, but I am willing to put $10 on it...

As For The Ugly
Well there are tons of ugly sites out there. So I'm not going to single out any one site however, I do want to mention that perhaps the ugliest truth about flash is that in spite of its many advantages flash adds a significant layer of added effort required for web site construction and content loading. Thus smaller companies are at a distinct disadvantage using flash as it still does not spider as efficiently, and the added cost for content loading and design is generally prohibitive.