Our company visuals are being redesigned, see Martin Hardee’s write-up; looks good. But as a side-effect, I looked at our front page and it still contains four instances of that vile word “solution”, plus more in the menus, plus it infests the rest of the site like aphids on a rose-bush. Bah. Dear world, take it from me: at Sun we sell actual real computers and networks and consulting and infrastructure services and software subscriptions; you can safely ignore the marketing-speak. It’s not just us; here’s a quick high-tech home-page “solution” survey, ongoing is all about quantitative research: CA leads the pack with 9, SAP trailing with 7. BEA has 3, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Oracle all have 2, Adobe, well it’s hard to tell, 1½ visible but lots more hiding in pop-ups and so on. Intel, Cisco, and HP have but one. Consumer plays like Yahoo and Google are happily “solution”-free. [Update: And I thought they were so clueful! It turns out that, depending where you’re coming from, some versions of Google’s front page have a link to “Business Solutions”; thanks for the pointer to Will Fitzgerald.]
