View of the Web Curtis Sasaki's Blog

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.