Archive for sun.com

Oracle.com & HP.com marketing content | It’s all about me

By Kenna Dian · Comments (1)
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Why Oracle.com and HP.com have a tough road ahead in the age of visitor-focused content

Oracle.com ContentI don’t talk about Oracle.com much. In fact, I speak about them so little that one would be lead to believe that I hold a grudge against them. Sure, they unceremoniously erased one of the best enterprise systems sites from the Internet–Sun.com. But, I won’t hold that against them. No, I don’t write about them much for one reason:

My Mother taught me if you don’t have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.

There’s a litany of issues I have with Oracle.com ranging from design to innovation (or rather a lack thereof). But today, my rant is about Oracle.com’s content. Read More→

Comments (1)
Categories : Design, Marketing, POV (point of view), Social Media & Social Networks, Strategy
Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oracle.com: New game, new rules, new problems

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (1)
Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

Oracle.com + Sun.com = less than the sum of their parts

Oracle.com has been the big Kahuna in the enterprise software industry for the past couple of years when it finally slipped past IBM’s Software Group site, which has been stuck in idle since early 2008. Then it decided to change the rules of its own game.

In 2009 Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in a quest to graduate into the business of selling hardware, software & services to the enterprise business set. Along with its red, white and black cap and gown, Oracle now gets to compete with the likes of IBM, HP and Dell. The question is, of course, how well does the combined Oracle.com & Sun.com sites perform against competitors that have been marketing & selling complex products online for well over a decade?

The answer is: not very well.

Read More→

Comments (1)
Categories : POV (point of view), Website Rankings
Tags : , , , , , ,

Why IBM Software, SAS, EMC, Intel, Brocade & Deloitte made the cut

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (0)
Monday, February 1st, 2010

This week we started our Q1 evaluations of 23 Websites, plus additional sites selected by our clients for comparison.

We’ve mixed up the siteIQ eBusiness Index for 2010. In some cases the decision was based on eliminating Websites that haven’t improved over the past year and don’t provide any good or best practices worth tracking. In other cases, sites have fallen off our list because they don’t exist anymore. That would be EDS.com which was integrated into HP.com — and Sun.com which went off the airwaves last week.

In both cases, these sites are a loss to anyone who cares about good and great practices. Don’t bother to follow them to their new homes. Their presence inside of their new parent’s sites is nothing to write home about.

Here’s some more about the new sites added to our roster – and why we’re singing “auld lang syne” to others. (If you are a siteIQ client you can read more about what we expect from these and other leading sites in 2010 in our new executive brief in the siteIntelligence Research Center). Read More→

Comments (0)
Categories : Branding, Communities, Design, eSelling, POV (point of view), Strategy, Web 2.0
Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oracle.com | The Baby and the Bathwater

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (2)
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

In July I shared some thoughts about the likely impact of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems from a Website perspective – plus a couple of suggestions from the peanut gallery. In the past few weeks, an era came to an end as some of the industry’s best and brightest Web professionals left the Sun.com team for greener pastures.

Of course, gone is not forgotten on the Web. Sun.com’s award winning usability & effectiveness and trendsetting best practices will be available online via the Wayback archives for years to come. For our part, our decade of work with the Sun.com team has generated gigs of best practices reviews. Although I can’t predict exactly when the Sun.com site will become the newest Borg within Oracle.com’s red and  white collective – I know that its forward thinking designs and best practices will be part of our analysis for years to come.

My hat is off to these professionals. Oracle’s loss is certain to be someone else’s gain.

Comments (2)
Categories : POV (point of view), Strategy
Tags : ,

Why Oracle.com has its hands full

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (2)
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

OK, it’s official. Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems by the end of the summer. Although I have to give Oracle kudos for a brilliant strategic acquisition (and tweaking IBM’s nose for good measure), flipping the Sun.com site into the Oracle paradigm won’t be as easy as its other acquisitions.

I’ve watched Oracle for about 30 years as an industry analyst — which means I’ve had a front row seat for all of Oracle’s growth, and most of its acquisitions.

When acquisitions are the issue, the script has always been pretty much the same. Oracle announces its intent to purchase an IT industry firm, engages in various firefights with a bevy of aggrieved CEOs and shareholders, occasionally spends some quality time with the SEC, finally closes the deal — and then takes the acquired company’s Website off the airwaves about two nanoseconds after the ink on the deal dries.

Generally, the first iteration of this process is a bit ham handed. Forget preserving the acquired company’s Web prowess & knowledge, brand, share of mind, or easing customers into a new parent organization. The acquired company’s URL is instantly directed to a landing page deep inside Oracle.com that announces the acquisition, positions the company’s products within Oracle’s strategic roster, points visitors to support, and  Read More→

Comments (2)
Categories : Design, Marketing, POV (point of view), Strategy
Tags : , , , , , , , , ,

What we learned while lurking on leading communities

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (1)
Friday, July 24th, 2009

Although evaluating 10 leading IT communities based on 490 criteria was a bit of a slog (and pencils out to looking for and scoring 4,900 types of content, features and capabilities, plus another 320 usability metrics), we did have some fun during the process.  While Kenna did the deep diving wearing her “power user” hat, I took a tour through every community with my “lurker beanie” on. The point of the exercise was to see how these communities look to visitors who are looking around to see if they want to join the party versus what’s actually delivered once you’ve married into the family.

It was a bit of a lark, to be sure. And like many of our larks, it delivered some interesting results.

Usability Scores Lurkers vs. MembersTo see why, take a peek at this graph that illustrates how the communities operated by seven leading IT companies fare based on 32 usability metrics.

First, the good news. SAP and Citrix deliver pretty much what is expected. The bad news for Citrix is that, at a 54% usability score, its community doesn’t look very usable – and it isn’t. At the other end of the spectrum, SAP’s communities appear to be the most usable – and (dismal look and feel aside) they are.

Next, let’s look at the sites that exceeded expectations. That would be Dell. My tour of the community delivered Dell an average 69.1% usability score. At 70.8%, Kenna’s power drive says that Dell’s communities actually deliver slightly more than expected.

This leaves us with the communities that are like an unfortunate blind date. Among these, EMC and Oracle fared worst.

My tour of EMC’s communities delivered good, but not great, usability results (62.4%), but Kenna’s deep dive shows that once you get past the flash, this community is almost unusable.

Oracle also seemed to be a reasonably usable venue if you are just lurking around, and my usability scores averaged out to 60.8%. By the time Kenna finished rambling through the site’s inconsistent behaviors and technical problems, she thought 54% was a gift.

Comments (1)
Categories : Communities, Design, POV (point of view), Web 2.0, Website Rankings
Tags : , , , , , , , , ,

Why Sun.com (still) aces the search best practice category

By Nicole Wallens · Comments (0)
Sunday, January 18th, 2009

I’m always getting questions about which site has the best search capabilities in the IT industry.  For my money, the answer is Sun.com. Here’s why.

Sun's redesigned search pages still deliver an industry best practice. Detailed content category, type, format and language filters make navigating results a snap

Sun's redesigned search pages still deliver an industry best practice. Detailed content category, type, format and language filters make navigating results a snap

Sun.com’s search design is very effective for delivering mountains of organized and logical search results because it sorts and presents information  based on common categories as well as resource type or affiliation.  Each category-specific page clearly indicates the number of results found within the category — and each list opens to display additional subcategories.

The “Search Help” link leads to useful, instructive information that is designed to help visitors construct a search that will yield the most relevant results. This page also includes several search hints designed to assist visitors in entering the most accurate key words or phrases that will yield the results they require.

Best of all, Sun.com offers an advanced site search feature under the “More Options” link that provides users with some truly unique capabilities. Users can specify that returned pages meet specific file format criteria (.PDF, XML, Text, HTML), and can also specify content written in up to 13 different languages.

Comments (0)
Categories : Search
Tags : , ,

Global Websites | The good, the bad and the (really) ugly

By Marty Gruhn · Comments (2)
Monday, January 12th, 2009

We recently put the finishing touches on our research project to identify how effectively leading IT companies address language requirements on 700+ global Websites operating in 232 countries around the globe. The companies under our microscope include the Who’s Who in enterprise systems (IBM, HP, Dell and Sun), enterprise software (SAP and Oracle), and the networking industry (Cisco and Nortel Networks). Quite frankly, we would have loved to add other major players, such as Microsoft, CA, Symantec, Adobe and others, but at 700 Websites we had our hands full.

The good news is that everyone can learn from the steps and mis-steps of these leading IT vendors.

siteIQ clients have access to our study results in a new siteIQ SnapShot report, Global Websites | Key Metrics | Language Compliance. For those who don’t have access to the siteIntelligence Research Center, I thought I’d share some of the more interesting things we learned.

The Big Picture

The IT industry has come a long way since we last looked at the global landscape in 2005. Then, language compliance in key markets, such as Latin America and Asia Pacific, were hit and miss at best. Today, these regions stand out as having some of the strongest language compliant Websites. Among the companies studied, Dell’s Latin American regional sites are the venues to watch.

In a reprise of our 2005 results, Oracle retains the crown as the worst global language performer.

languagebyregion09On the other end of the spectrum, the emerging market du jour – Eastern Europe – is a language compliance disaster. Here, companies are following a number of less-than-effective strategies.

Those that deliver sites in Russian appear to be unaware that this language is spoken in less than half of the 29 countries in this region. Others, like Oracle, fall back on English-based Websites in a region where English is not a first, second or an official language. None of the companies we studied “get it”, but if you want to see the best of a bad lot, spend some time observing Eastern European sites operated by IBM.

Read More→

Comments (2)
Categories : Global Websites
Tags : , , , , , , , , , ,

Sun.com plays catch-up by launching a new home page

By Nicole Wallens · Comments (0)
Thursday, November 20th, 2008

If you’ve visited Sun.com in the last week or so there’s no doubt that you noticed a brand new home page that is a dramatic departure from the previous iteration. From a visual perspective, the most striking changes are the full use of bold color that gives the page more weight & substance (which translates to sophistication in the minds of visitors), and a re-architected template that — although not radically different from the previous construct — delivers a wealth of links in a much more efficient manner.

Striking changes include the bold use of color and a more efficient design

Striking changes include the bold use of color, more balanced navigation, and a more efficient design

Beyond these immediately eye-catching alterations are an assortment of more subtle modifications that achieve a couple of objectives. First, navigational options are more evenly distributed, which balances home page content. Second, popular features, including downloads & free trials, are more prominently positioned making them particularly obvious & accessible to visitors.

Visual changes aside, the most significant modifications to the Sun.com home page lie in the reorganization of existing links — and addition of new links — that allow visitors to enter the site based on affiliation or objective. Admittedly, the previous home page provided access to resources via a smattering of audience-specific links and often encouraged visitors to Read More→

Comments (0)
Categories : Design
Tags : , , , ,

Reseller sites give Dell.com a run for its (e-selling) money

By Nicole Wallens · Comments (0)
Saturday, May 17th, 2008

Ever since we made the decision to add reseller sites to our eBusiness Index roster for 2008, I’ve been curious to see how they would perform against some of the IT industry’s selling powerhouses, including HP.com, Dell.com, and IBM.com. I wasn’t curious about their competitive performance, per se. Reseller sites are significantly smaller than their enterprise-class counterparts, even though they sell many of the same products. That automatically means their overall rankings will be lower. What I was curious about is how well these reseller sites would stack up based on their usability.

Insight.com and Newegg.com both receive scores that place them in a league with IT industry leaders -- and well ahead of one of their major partners -- HP.com

Insight.com and Newegg.com both receive scores that place them in a league with IT industry leaders — and well ahead of one of their major partners — HP.

When I rolled up the first quarter 2008 usability numbers this week, a couple of interesting facts jumped out. First, Newegg.com’s product marketing score is nearly 71%, which puts it on par with the eBusiness Index average (71.38%) — and places it in close proximity to enterprise systems heavyweights in the effectiveness rankings. Second, and more important, all three reseller sites — Newegg.com, CDW.com, and Insight.com — earn e-selling-related usability scores that are well above the eBusiness Index average, and actually rival those of the ultimate online channel — Dell.com.

Admittedly, these are two bright spots in an otherwise checkered usability landscape for these companies.  Read More→

Comments (0)
Categories : eSelling
Tags : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Next Page »
 Subscribe

Receive Best Practice Alerts


Get the latest best practices, blogs, and news delivered in your email.

Sign up for the siteIQ Digest:

Marty Gruhn on Twitter

Follow Kenna Dian on Twitter

siteIQ, Inc  •   Copyright © 2012 All Rights Reserved