Homepages
09 May 2008
You may well be familiar with the homepage of the BBC or Google but how often have you looked at the homepages of the giants of the IT world, such as Oracle, Microsoft or IBM?
These companies have found the answer to the problematic question of how to advertise as succinctly as possible, at a high-level, a large number of often-disparate products and services. The reason for this is more than just sheer number as some of these may be recent acquisitions through corporate takeover, so a lack of common branding is often a problem. Instead, they sell an idea or an aspiration – or failing these, simply tap into the latest buzzword-compliant topic. A recent selection of top-level links from corporate homepages:
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green data-centres;
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server virtualisation;
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environmental responsibility;
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petabyte server storage.
I’m sure that a lot of effort goes into these articles but I’m not sure who they’re aimed at – I don’t think Chief Executives spend their time surfing the homepages of large IT corporations. Instead, I suspect that these homepages are reassuring, eye-catching placeholders designed to show that the company is in touch with popular high-level topics of the day.