Sun.com Turns 10
How customers helped shape Sun's Web sites over the past decade.
28.Jan.04--Sun.com began as a box in a closet. A small team of engineers used it to post a single page of type as the Sun home page on the Internet. That was ten years ago this week.
Today, sun.com is a large federation of Web sites served from four data centers, housing 2,000,000 pages and serving more than a million visitors a day. It's powered by a dozen machines, each twenty times as powerful as the original little box.
Hassan Schroeder was the first sun.com Webmaster. "I was in a small group working to get Sun online with its first Web site," says Schroeder. On January 28, 1994, a co-worker typed in a page of Sun's Annual Report as the only content. "All text, not even a Sun logo," remembers Schroeder.
The page was hosted from a single-processor SPARC station located in a networking lab the size of a closet. Schroeder was there to plug the machine in. "That evening, I logged in from home on a 9600 baud modem and saw that we had received our first webmaster e-mail. It just said, 'Cool!'"
Good Designs Make History
In the years that followed, sun.com became a breeding ground for new Web design ideas, changing daily, reinventing itself every few months, pulling several new ideas together in a single page. Edge stuff.
"It was very exciting to construct a new world that had never existed before," remembers Jakob Nielsen, then a design lead and now a principal at Web consultants Nielsen Norman. "We had a weekly group meeting, and every week it seemed that the Web had been reinvented and turned into something new. There was always somebody in the meeting who brought up a completely novel idea or reported on a breakthrough project from some other company. It was like building a house while inventing the concept of bricks at the same time."
Early on, Sun created a unique idea for sun.com that became an industry standard: Running regular usability tests to improve the site continually.
"As we watched people use these early Web site designs, we realized that we had a tremendously powerful way to connect with customers, and for customers to connect back to us," says Martin Hardee, director for Customer Experience for the sun.com sites. "It became clear to us pretty quickly that the Web was about engaging with the world--getting people information quickly, delivering products and services, building communities--way beyond being just the technological curiosity that was so hyped at the time."
It would have been easy to invent and integrate new ideas to show off the latest, hippest, coolest designs on the Web--design for design's sake. But instead, the Web team realized that the real game was to make the Web site work for the company by focusing on the customer's needs. In the years since, the "focus on the customer" mantra has only intensified and proven its worth--a million times a day.
A Continued Shift of Focus
Lew Tucker, Sun's vice president of Internet Services, responsible for all of Sun's Web presence, agrees. "We began with the idea of sun.com being launched by engineers for engineers. Since then, however, every step in the evolution of the site has been focused on making it more accessible and more useful for all of Sun's customers, not just engineers."
In fact, the site's usefulness in serving customers is the ruling principle that guides its continuing evolution. If a design element doesn't support that principle, it won't be used.
Measured Effectiveness Drives Its Design
Tucker says, "Sun.com visitors are generally not 'browsing the Web.' They come to sun.com and our other sites looking for something in particular, and we want to make it easy for them to find it. That's how we measure our effectiveness."
Over the years, the sun.com team has redesigned the entire site about every 12-18 months to stay ahead. "Rapid evolution is a fact of the corporate Web," says Tucker. "It moved from the days of 'brochure ware' to basic interactivity, and then to e-commerce."
Now Sun is designing methods of Web "personalization" with customization down to each user's individual needs, along the way to offering Web services over a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Quick, Disaggregate
"With Web services, we disaggregate the available data, content, and services into their component parts, then we custom-reassemble them for each user's needs at the moment," says Tucker.
"Now, sun.com is XML-based, we're component-based, and we've separated authoring from presentation--all critical for a services-based architecture," he says. "And that gives the user the maximum degree of efficient, targeted customization, entitled access, and more device flexibility. It's already a better Web experience for our users and more cost effective for us."
And next, "we're looking at ways to deliver the 'ubiquitous Web'--one that includes your phones, stereos, TVs, environmental controls, and your car."
Then he adds, "It's a good thing we're an engineering company."
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