Finding Product
You might know exactly what you're looking for, or you might not really know at all. You might have been told to find something because the one you've already got is suddenly under a cloud of smoke, or you maybe never had one at all. You might even just think you should get one because you read somewhere that you should. You might just have thought that the title of this post was a bit like 'Finding Nemo' and so you've not actually read this far, because it reminded you that you wanted to book to see Ratatouille at the cinema and you've now gone somewhere else.
In any case, if you're just setting off on your journey down the road marked 'product', hoping to be directed to your final destination by some kind of virtual sat nav that knows exactly where you're heading, even if you don't, then you're in for a frustrating ride. The truth is, even though companies like Sun have been trying to steer customers via the web to the products they need to solve their business problems for years, we're still not very good at it. We're better than we were, but we're still not very good. It's not just Sun. Most of our competitors are pretty rubbish at it too. If you're lucky enough to be looking for a specific product that falls into the 'we found loads of money and got a vendor to design a matrix for our entire product line of 3 products and then build a microsite' category, then your task might be relatively straightforward. But suppose you want another product. One that's a bit like the one you just got, but a bit different, say, like buying storage for your servers. Should be simple right? But wait, this microsite looks completely different, and there's no navigation at all, oh, hang on, there it is, oh, no it isn't, and, hey, there's hundreds of these things, which one do I need? They're all called the same thing, what's that all about?
This can be even more frustrating if you actually know what you want and you think you know where you can find it. You might have pretty well-defined selection criteria for your product. It has to have 2 of these, be that big, cost less than that and run this, that and the other. Lemme at 'em. What do mean I can't filter? I have to look at every single product in this product line and read all the data? I mean, like, compare it myself? Look, these products don't even list that data. That's the most important thing! Oh, forget it.
I'm painting a pretty woeful picture to illustrate the point, of course, but the fundamental issue remains - trying to find products to suit your need can be a difficult task. At this point, it would usual for me to tell you that we're working on a fantastic new architecture for product finding on the web, driven by customer needs and supported by a redesigned data framework, that would allow us to categorize, subcategorize, filter and compare across entire product lines, with current pricing and compelling reasons to buy, linked in with all the latest deals. Well, we are. I'll let you know how it goes, and you can let me know if it works.
Tunes: We Are Scientists: This Scene Is Dead
