View of the Web Curtis Sasaki's Blog

Over the last two weeks we've made many changes to sun.com.  Yesterday we launched a tweaked up new home page that improves the sites navigation and readability in many ways.  We looked at tons of data over the last year to see what people viewed, where they came from, where they go, how many seconds to look at things, how often they return to see what worked and didn't work on our site.  We also put folks through usability testing to do sanity checks on our designs and information architecture, but at the end of the day it will be the new data we collect that will give us a clue if our new designs have improved.  So we welcome open feedback as well as private comments.  Last week, we also integrated a new ecommerce backend into Sun.com and are the process of changing completely the user experience on buying on line from Sun.  

Rather than having a separate "store" to buy from the actual information about a product, we integrated configuring and buying into each of our product pages.  We think that as you learn about our products, read the outside customer reviews, read blogs and testimonials that being able to configure, quote, and buy should be part of that same experience.  Check out our T2000 server product page for an example.  This is the first step of our migration of all products into this new user experience so be patient as this transition takes place.

As always, we take all customer feedback very seriously -  good and bad. 

 

 

I joined Sun over 10 years ago to work in the Javasoft team. Back then, it was run by Alan Baratz and had an amazing energy level. You could tell that what we were all working on had industry changing potential. But who would have guessed that 10 years later, Java would continue to thrive and change what computing can do. A few years ago, Patrice Peyret and I proposed to Alan and his staff that we formally create the Java editions, known as J2SE, J2EE, and J2ME. And it was amazing how quickly the decision was made to move forward, to notify all the Java licensees, and to announce it at JavaOne. 

 

That was a pretty amazing ride. I also remember working closely with Jim Mitchell and Bill Lard to create the first license for Java so the code could be viewed free of charge as long as it was for non-commercial use. I think that was my first taste at community, open source licenses, and licensee dynamics/politics. But over the years, there has been so many bright, dedicated, passionate folks who worked on Java (both in Sun and outside of Sun) that certainly all deserve a round of applause. Read all the blogs, all the announcements, and step back and really understand the magnitude of what you all have been a part of. Congratulations to Java, to James, and to all who contributed.

Martin Hardee and I had a chance to spend time with a whos who of web user experience experts from around the world. It was my first meeting and while Martin briefed me in what to expect, how to contribute, and who to meet, I was pleasantly surprised at the openness, spirit of helping each other, and sharing that this new community offered. It was refreshing to see folks openly talk about what they tried, what worked, what they'd do different the next time in a very candid manor.

 

Needless to say, if world leaders can work in this same spirit of openness, honesty, and candor, the world itself would benefit. I hope to contribute to the group as much as I can in the spirit that I observed. And the one key take away I learned from everyone there is, that it is OK to ask for help.

As one of the few groups in Sun that actually manages a robust datacenter (the one that runs Sun.com, java.com, etc.) our announcement today couldn't be more timely. We face similiar challenges of a growing user base, a range of new applications, user models, and an ever increasing amount of data and bandwidth needs, that we think we could also be a future customer for Project Blackbox. Just like when the first electric cars were "leased" in the Bay Area, you could actually find "electrical recharge" stations in alot of places- including our beloved Fry's Electronics. What would really be nice is if the industry would standardize on a "docking port" whereby all electric connections, cooling, and networking are as easy as plugging in to a standard socket. It would be a wonderful world to have true plug-and-play datacenters. A simple idea, but with potential for major change in how datacenters are architected in the future. One that my team now needs to rethink.

A few years back, I had the opportunity to manage the Staroffice/Openoffice development team. During that period, the arguement Microsoft used to make on why not to switch was the cost of retraining. We heard numbers that would put fear, uncertainty, and doubt (the FUD factor) into the cost. What will be very interesting to watch is how they position Office 2007 with respect to retraining, relearning. Funny, that for many customers it may actually be much lower cost and lower risk to now switch to Openoffice (which is FREE) and is very easy to move over to if you already know MS Office pre 2007. And having surpassed 60 million downloads, users will be good company of other "switchers". It'll be nice to save a couple of hundred dollars too! I'll run out an get a couple of new iPod Shuffles!

This will be my first post that is not "work related". Last week, while enjoying 81 degree weather in the San Juan Islands, north of Seattle, while riding a moped, i must have hit gravel only to find myself in a ditch on the side of the road. Other than seeing blood flowing from my knee, I thought I escaped pretty unscathed. Well, the next day, I noticed the left side of my rib cage felt sensitive, but remembered what the moped renter told me - if you get hurt bad, the only way off the island was an emergency helicopter and that was $10,000 USD. Well, I knew I wasn't hurt that bad and continued with my vacation adventures of whale watching and hiking. Well to make a long story short, 9 days later, my side has gotten worse and reading all the medical websites, it made me wonder if I had broken a bone or at least had a bruised rib. Sucking it up, I finally went to the doctor for X-RAYs (noticed they were using GE Imaging system, but the old film style, not the cool new digital systems that use Java technology). Well I got the news, I have 2 ribs with fractures. No wonder, it hurts and everytime I cough, I hurt even more. For my pain, I got a "support belt" and the typical advise of, take Advil and call me in the morning. As the story goes, I don't have a clue why I waited 9 days , maybe it was the first $10K helicopter ride emergency flight that lingered in my mind. But I've been home for almost a week and live less than a mile away from the doctor. Too much stupid pride I guess.... oh well, learned a lesson. And for the 81 degree weather in Seattle, I wonder if the story of rain is really a ploy to keep us Californians from moving? Nah, I lived in Seattle for six years and know when to go! Still, its a beautiful city.

I frequently look at what kinds of companies Sand Hill Road venture capitalist fund. Lately, there seems to be a whole lot of activity in the RSS space. This has got me thinking if in 2-3 years, we will see a huge drop in viewers coming to corporate websites like sun.com. Seeing what many in the press corps or analysts do for their work, will their model of aggregating blogs, newswire feeds, press releases, podcasts in RSS feeds to their personal aggregation page carry over to regular web users? If that premise is true, users could personalize their web view with content coming from many sites and could immediately see information about Sun, IBM, HP, and others with just the cut of information that they believe is relevant. Does this mean the companies website goes away, probably not, but we should move quickly to rethink information delivery that is already knocking on our doorstep. We will have to watch if the main sites begin to see any drop off in visitors and observe any pickup in information fed through RSS.

A few years back, the buzz on Sand Hill Road was around blogging and now it's getting to be given. Of course, there's a whole lot of buzz around YouTube and MySpace as well. How this all works out will certainly be interesting to experience.

Since I used to run the StarOffice team in Hamburg several years ago, one of the areas that has been missing is on the document management, sharing, and collaboration area. It's been one of my pet peeves for awhile now as companies (like Sun) have to deal with thousands of documents created across the company. And in today's world, it's all about working together in teams. To my delight, one of our engineering managers for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org let me know of a possible solution. Check out: http://www.o3spaces.org/

With more applications also supporting the Open Document Format (ODF) like Writely that Google acquired (for example), having solutions on the server side becomes more critical. It's really awesome to see more solutions building out the ODF ecosystem and not just contributors to the OpenOffice code base.

We know there is a lot to do to enable easier ecommerce.

There has been a lot of blog comments about the current US SunStore. This storefront was designed years ago and we know the world has come a long way. We believe that ecommerce is made up of at least three connections.

First, the traditional Business-to-Consumer. This is typical of the consumer stores you might experience going to sony.com, or Amazon. For an enterprise company, having an easy to use storefront allows customers to easily generate quotes, do comparison shopping, and allows easy transactions to occur. Along with a storefront comes business processes. This is usually where the hard work is as it must be coordinated with many groups within a company- from sales, to order processing, finance, and operations.

The second area is direct Business-to-Business (other wise known as EDI. When companies buy direct, they want to have custom catalogs with pre-approved configurations, pre-negotiated pricing all show up, then link to their existing purchasing systems to automate the approval process. Once an order is placed, gooing directly into the vendors systems as booked simplifies the ordering and delivery cycle, cuts down on transactions costs, and improves the complete end-to-end experience. Many companies will not do business with you unless you can deliver the integration.

The third area is what we call Busines-through-Partner (B2P). Many companies work with reseller partners who add value or specialize in certain segments. Unfortunately, many of the resellers have to replicate the product catalog, create custom price lists, and manually have to feed back the actual orders. Many modern systems can also directly automate how partners can utilize the vendors "storefront" with full brand customization. The beauty with this model is it saves the reseller from having to recreate the supply chain all over again, improves the quality of the order, and of course, with the ease of use, should also grow overall revenue.

We are actively developing these new capabilities to really bring Sun's ecommerce capabilities to the cutting edge (finally). We read pretty much all the comments out there on the current experience or in some cases, lack of. It'll be really wonderful to finally put in place a modern, web services based ecommerce platform that really can help drive simplicity and more on-line revenue. Exciting times ahead.

I had a chance to visit JavaOne (my 10th) this week. Unlike my previous visits, I didn't have to spend days on end in a 5x5 conference room talking to the press, analysts, or customers. That in itself made this JavaOne different for me personally. Walking the floor, I got to see the momentum that Java has in the mobility area (gratifying as I was involved in the first 5 years of the initiative) as well as renewed momentum with Java on the desktop.

I also ran into my old (at least not age wise) CTO for the Desktop Solutions group, Hans Muller, who reminded me of lot of things we talked about years prior that have come to fruition. Hans is one those smart engineers who also has a keen sense of humor. A great guy to have around!

Watching the video wall, it was nice to see George Paolini, my old boss, and Tim Lindholm, one of the key engineers on Java (both desktop and mobile) talk about their experiences in the development and marketing of Java. I skipped taking my picture with Duke this year-- one year he/she pinched me (turns out it was Keith in the suit). So many people had a touch in the evolution of the platform (with many also being in companies outside of Sun). In summary, JavaOne is always a good reminder that passion and openness can still drive innovation and business value.

I've had the opportunity to know Jonathan when he was at Lighthouse and I worked at NeXT. Back in those days, we NeXT-ies, really liked to demo Lighthouse applications because they reflected our vision of where software should go -- early innovations like drag-and-drop, drop shadows, translucency, were reflected in NeXTSTEP and in Lighthouse applications. One of their applications, Concurrent, became the inspiration of Apple's Keynote. If there is one thing Jonathan has always had was an eye for the details. As CEO, we are excited to have this level of detail brought across the entire company.

Best of luck and congratulations to Jonathan.

When I'm shopping on the web, I find my self first looking at customer ratings-- how many gold stars a product receives and then reading the comments. I find the transparency of information quite appealing vs purely reading the "pre-orchestrated" customer testimonials. What I find interesting is there are so few technology companies willing to do this with their own products. In looking at Apple's site, I find it interesting to see they support customer ratings for their keyboards, mice, and "peripheral" products, but you don't see them on iMac, MacBook Pro, or their other main line computers. I have to believe the Mac faithful would shower the products with gold stars.

We are now exploring implementing this to Sun's products. Sure, the knees shake in our marketing team as no one wants to see the one star, but I have to believe we will also learn a whole lot by doing this. We will be humbled at times, but also gain quick insight into the "hot buttons" of our customers. Hopefully we can weed out our competitors who want to "play the system" to make our products look bad. This goes hand in hand with community and sharing -- which are core values for Sun. It will be interesting to watch what happens, just as it's been amazing to see blogs change the landscape of transparency.

I've been trying to find a nice architectully inspired column to help "hold up my roof". Those who live in California know that holding up roofs well these days is pretty important with our "Seattle-ish" weather of late. There are some really beautiful sites to buy on-line PVC, Stone or wood columns. And they are so ecommerce friendly that you can chat with someone while you browse. Pretty helpful in getting your questions answered. I've also been looking at getting a replacement laptop battery for an old Sony laptop. Went to the CompUSA on-line site and found they only had the single capacity battery (at least that is what was listed). I saw a little Chat button and instantly hit that and after waiting a few minutes, a person (at least I think it was a humanoid)named Brian asked how he could help me. I asked if they carried the super duper, high capacity battery and he came back with a link in the CompUSA site with it. I then asked if I could go to their Stevens Creek Store to pick it up, but no, it was a web only product. Point is, sometimes you can't find what you need on a site (sorry search engines) or need a little nudge deciding and doing this in real time is really nice.

This week, on sun.com, we launched real time Chat and Call Me now for those downloading Solaris 10 (for free), looking at the Sun T2000 wicked fast server offered as a try-it-free for 60 days promo. We are doing this as a pilot to help customers and also learn what kind of questions are asked, how to improve our overall customer experience, and of course, hopefully get a few downloaders to buy a support plan or a few more folks to try our server.

Human-to-human real time using technology. Is this really bringing "personal" back to the web, We will see.

It's always gratifying to see folks you really enjoy working with return! I had the privilege to work with Peder Ulander when we focused on breathing renewed energy into Sun's desktop initiatives. What's fun about Peder is his creativity and drive to make others have fun while working hard. With that it'll be fun to jam with the man. Welcome back Peder.

What makes us want to go back to web sites or even retail stores? Is it just for low prices, nice designs, or is it about trust or a relationship. I'm sure all of us have had a great experience with a web company and probably a poor one as well. The question then is what makes a good web relationship? Sure, finding your way around (aka easy navigation) is one thing, but also presenting relevant information when you want it also impacts your experience. Of course, some sites go way overboard in "remembering" to much about what you looked at. Do I really care that someone remembers I looked at a book 11 months ago? Some site have a simple task of presenting you relevant content Babycenter.com, who we invited to speak to my staff, has the benefit of knowing when a baby is due and can work backward and forward in time and present you information that is relevant during the trimesters. What a nice advantage they have in knowing what is going on and what you might be experiencing and being able to present relevant information. As a technology solutions provider, we have to know our different audiences, know what is important to each, and try not to insult any one of our visitors with non-relevant information. We also have the challenge of some visitors are shoppers, some are researchers, some are kick the tires downloaders of our software -- all of which are perfectly fine.

The industry talks non stop now of Web 2.0, AJAX, and all the personalization capabilities. What I see us striving to do is to find the right blend of an orchestrated experience. We should look beyond single point in time views of our web sites, but plan out 1-3 years of how someone can/should experience Sun Microsystems on the web. This is the emergence of the Customer Lifecycle Experience. Maybe its similiar in concept of ILM and ALM, but focused on you, the viewer/customer.

The future is more than purely a personal experience, it will be about what, when, and how we communicate (of course in personal, relevant ways). Just as we see from sites like Babycenter.com, there is a lot to learn about timely, relevant, and personal communications.