Now I know how parents feel when their children leave home and become something, well, truly unremarkable.

This new vw.com is less than stunning. It's depressing.

Perhaps that's a bit of sour grapes. After all, I did help lead four major redesigns of vw.com from 1999 to 2005. But I think I earned the right to critique.

So on the one hand, I salute the achievement of launching an entirely new OEM site. It's no easy feat, especially for Volkswagen.

Mostly, I'm curious about the strategy and the user experience. I'm curious about the forces and motivations behind the scenes. Because none of these larger metaphors make sense. What research lead CP+B to believe searching vw.com was the ultimate priority for the majority of visitors to this site? Is the VW brand really that lost here in America? Or did user data and site testing demonstrate people couldn't find things on the previous site?

It's also interesting to see someone else wrestling with issues we wrestled with for years. Configuration processes. Campaign microsites. Nomenclature—for example, the new site calls it "VW Hype." We called it, over the years, "VW Life," "VW Etc" and and "Culture." I can't suggest we had everything figured out perfectly, because we didn't. But I'm not certain this new direction improves any of the old stumbling blocks either; in fact, I think it creates more.

In 2000 (version 2.0 of vw.com) we convinced Volkswagen to redesign its site with a "remote control." The idea was simple enough:  Main navigation in one, vertical, narrow browser window and content in a larger browser window. It was designed like Photoshop or Word—a palette of controls, and a main display ("work") area. Javascript calls adjusted content from one browser window to the other. We even put the RadioVW.com tuner into the "remote."

It was a failure.  Technically, we created a monster. But I think the bigger issue was separation, and a confusing metaphor for navigation. In that sense, this new direction feels uncomfortably familiar.

Time will tell of course, about the viability of the new vw.com.

Oh, and sales—let's not forget those.