Against my better judgement, I bought a Sony TV in Miami and had it shipped to the Bahamas. It's a 46" Bravia that within its first week, started showing a 3" stripe along the right side of the screen. It was red when it should have been black, yellow when it should have been green, etc, etc and so on and so forth.

But that's not what I came to talk about.

At some point during my travels, Sony got it into its head that I live in Latin America. So much so that now whenever I try to navigate to www.sony.com, I'm redirected to www.sony-latin.com/corporate.

When I first tried to hit sony.com, it detected something from my browser (or more likely my IP address since my computer probably still thinks I'm in the US) and asked me if I wanted to go to sony.com or the Sony Bahamas regional site. I.E. sony-latin.com. I went with sony.com and had it remember my preference but that was duly ignored.

(For now, I'm ignoring the ludicrous idea that the Bahamas should be considered part of Latin America. I'm also ignoring the odyssey I've had to endure )

The main issue with the Sony Latin site is, as far as I can tell, there is no way to get back to sony.com. There is a link to Global Home, which takes you to sony.net (which has its own issues, like the fact that the Bahamas doesn't even exist in their list of countries) but nothing back to sony.com. At least nothing in English.

There are other problems with sony-latin.com. Firstly, the dropdown menus don't work in Firefox which essentially means you can't navigate anywhere from the homepage. (And even in IE, I'm getting javascript errors with the menu.) And clicking on the Puerto Rico e-mail link from this site gives a Public Area General Error! which is a new one to me. (Ya, I know what you're going to say. I have no idea why I would be directed to the Puerto Rico support site either.)

Salient points:

  • Sony doesn't appear to be putting in even the minimum amount of effort required for sony-latin.com. The two errors I found are pretty glaring. After all, Firefox is on version 2.
  • Sony does however appear to have put in some effort to try to direct non-US customers to the right place. The problem being, they've put in a lot of effort and it's worse than, say, Dell where at least you can switch to the US site if they've directed you to the wrong place.
  • The Bahamas simply should not be considered part of Latin America. I don't speak Spanish (and in fact, many Bahamians are still working on English as their first language judging from the slogans from the recent political campaign). I could see the argument though considering the nearest US city is Miami.

For the sake of closure, I did manage to get to sony.com after clearing my cookies. Firefox took me to the page where I had to choose sony.com or sony-latin.com and I also chose to remember my preference. Then I closed my browser and went to sony.com again and was directed to sony-latin.com.

<sigh> ¿Cualquier persona desea comprar una televisión nueva?