Tech Dogg's Dox Tox

Posted in Work at 2:30:06 PM on 05 March 2007  |  Comments: 8

Everyone loves to complain. Especially about docs.sun.com. People inside and outside Sun complain that it's difficult to find information about a topic, mostly because of problems with its search engine. So they say, anyway.

But that's not the problem, I think.

What is?

We dump product brands.

Too frequently.

With too much alacrity.

And then we replace them with "new and improved" brands. How are our customers supposed to keep up with that?

I went on a job interview last October (another topic, another blog). When I bragged to my interviewer, once a Solaris system administrator, that I'd formerly worked at Sun as a technical writer, he launched into a little dervish about Solaris documentation. All of a sudden I didn't feel so good. I live for moments like this, you know?

"How am I supposed to know that Sun calls its volume manager DiskSuite?" he asked. "And how am I supposed to find documentation for it if I don't know what it's called? Sun assumes its customers know the names of their products. You know what? They don't!"

This got me to thinking.

Was he right?

See for yourself. Enter "volume manager" on docs.sun.com, and this is what you get:

Was he right? Appears so. I don't see any hits for DiskSuite. Do you?

Hold on though. The truth is, I do.

Sort of.

Sun calls DiskSuite Solaris Volume Manager now. Since Solaris 9.

If you wade past the initial entries for Sun Cluster (yet another topic for another blog), you see entries for Solaris Volume Manager, aka DiskSuite. Of course I know that because I'm the one who has to change all the old brand references in the documentation.

But how's my unhappy camper supposed to know that?

This question got me to thinking even more.

Why does Sun dump product brands so frequently? I mean, here's just a sample:

iPlanet [whatever]	Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) [whatever]	Sun Java System [whatever]
SunStorage	Sun StorageTek
Patch Manager	Sun Update Connection	Solaris Connection
Forte for Java 4	Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) Studio 4	Sun Java System Studio 4
Web Start Flash	Solaris Flash
Online: DiskSuite	Solstice DiskSuite	Solaris Volume Manager
SunPlex Manager	Sun Cluster	Sun Java System Cluster	Solaris Cluster
N1 Grid Containers	Solaris Containers

I'm sure you can think of a few yourself.

Compare that with a few other brands, brands that haven't changed--as far as I know anyway:

• Microsoft Word
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Office
• Norton Antivirus (Symantec even kept the brand after it bought Norton!)
• Norton PartitionMagic
• Symantec pcAnywhere
• Adobe Acrobat
• Adobe Premiere
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe FrameMaker (like Symantec, Adobe also decided to keep the brand after buying Frame)

What gives? Why do we feel the urge to change our product brands so often, if at all?

Are we that insecure?

When I was 15, I went to a carnival that my hometown hosted every year. Along the midway, I discovered the amusement where you have to burst a balloon with a water pistol. You know, the one where you shoot a stream of water into a hole and inflate the balloon?

The thing I remember most about winning the stuffed toy that day is this: I won because, unlike everybody else, I focused only on shooting the water into the hole that inflated the balloon. Everyone else was focused on everyone else. (Well okay, to know that, I had to have looked, but I did that only once, at the beginning.)

That's what I see happening here. We're worrying too much about what our competitors are doing or not doing, when they're doing it or when they're not doing it. We're responding. Not leading.

That's why you see things like "This Computer" and  Documents  on the Solaris 10 desktop. I mean, come on. Really.

Yeah, the Java and Solaris brands are probably our most popular brands right now. But do we have to forsake all our other just-as-worthy brand names for their sake every time some competitor appears to scrape away a subfraction of a percentage point from our market share?

Well, do we?

But who am I to ponder these kinds of questions? In the big corporate schema: nobody really. I just work here.

Nonetheless, I worry. I worry what customers--or worse--potential customers, feel when they try to find information about Sun Cluster 3.2 on docs.sun.com, and can't, simply because they don't know we've gone and changed its brand to "Solaris Cluster".

All product or service names are the property of their respective owners.

Comments: 8