Being an optimistic type person, I seem to detect through the mist, a strategy the new regime at Delta.Dumb may be employing.

The new Home page, the new Sky Miles record page with total miles, etc. now shown, the new mobile ap are displays of some progress, albeit nothing earth shaking.

My wild guess about possible award calendar fixes, the most important area in need of improvement, is that these "nice to have" changes to other areas are an attempt to show somebody is actually working on making Delta.Dumb better.

I am wildly optimistic that these minor changes rolled out recently means there are legions of others beavering away in a semi dark room somewhere to fix the award calendar. But then again, I think the Cubs will win the World Series sometime before I die.

Cheers

And I believe that Santa's elves are beavering away in a semi dark room at the North Pole making toys for good little girls and boys.

Santa's elves should really be helping the Cubs win the Series. Think of the tiny strike zone!

The elves are running DL's IT department? No wonder things are so Goofy.

Elves? I thought they had hired goblins!

When I look at the new delta.dumb homepage, it screams MISPLACED PRIORITIES to me. It looks good, but the functionality is what matters. Then again, I didn't agree that the most important thing to do after the merger was to repaint the NW planes.

+1

The phrase "turd polish" comes to mind.

While the repaint doesn't do much for us - it is actually critical from a branding standpoint. They were trying to create a one brand image - NW is dead you don't want people to keep seeing it on the sides on planes

+1 the new homepage and the crappy iphone app are indicative of the misplaced priorities of delta's IT leadership! The sad thing os that, many years ago, Delta IT was considered leading I. The industry! All they've done is to degrade function while making poorly-working fancy graphics

As someone who has deals in web applications with a similar size and scope as DL.com the one thing I always noticed was the file change count every time they rolled an upgrade. It always seems way out of wack for the changes they were making. Either they were doing a lot more than they let on, or the fundamental framework of the site was way to rigid for the feature cycle they are in. I suspect it was a lot of the later.

Usually when you see a major release where all but a few things look about the same it's a sign that they are making changes to their core framework/systems. If they have planned things out right it means future changes would be more nimble and perhaps some aspect could be made more stable.

On the other hand, poorly planned, even the best frameworks can make the problems worse. It's too soon to tell where DL.com is going. But in my professional opinion, based on how the site operated and the comments by various DL IT folks over the past 18 months, the old DL.com was deficient in a lot of ways. Maybe the new blood in the group can change the course of that ship. Maybe the talent jumped ship (or was pushed off) post merger.

Not only that, repainting planes is a lot less complex than merging two IT systems and rolling out a new website. It's not like they could have reassigned the painting crews to write business applications.

I choose to share the OP's optimism on the changes to delta.com. I did think that launching only a new homepage last month was premature and raised hopes needlessly, but it did simplify some of the more common tasks for average users. With the much improved SkyMiles Activity page, it looks like the promised incremental improvements are coming.

I am cautiously optimistic; even with a working booking engine we still need the seats and levels provided by SkyMiles and Rev Mgmt. When DL wants 380K in J for the same flight that AA is offering in F at 125K something is very wrong.

Its just about power-point slides for completely detached executives. I'm sure the Exec briefing slide for IT to DL upper ranks looks like:

- deployed new Delta Home page
- deployed new Iphone application

and so on - the details of actual user experience never makes the priority list.....

sounds like someone thinks Cohn's Law (which I believe it dates from the mid-1960s, so it precedes PowerPoint by 20-some years) is apparently still alive and well

"The more time you spend reporting on what you are doing, the less time is available for actually doing anything. Stability is achieved when you are doing nothing, but you spend all your time reporting on the nothing that you are doing."

You're missing the point. I don't think anyone is suggesting that Delta should have assigned plane painters to website development (although the evidence is that they apparently have assigned the janitorial staff to IT strategy development and prioritization). The recommendation is that, given a fixed pot of money, Delta should have been spending less money on vanity items (painting the exterior of planes, which most of the traveling public don't pay attention to (they pay attention to the iNTERIOR of the aircraft, where they are sitting); designing pretty graphics for the website; and so on). Instead, they should have focused the fixed pot of money on substantive changes (phasing out BE 1.0/WBC more quickly in favor of the lie-flats; fixing functional flaws on the website; etc.)