July 18th, 2007
So why is SunRocket's site still up? Here's why
I guess the few remaining SunRocket employees had to pack up and leave so darn quickly on Monday, no one had time to put up a placeholder on the site saying no new orders are being accepted, and as a matter of fact, we’re gone.
You would have thought that, anyway.
But as you can see in the area where my cursor is pointing to the time (Pacific Daylight) I went to the old site just a few minutes ago, and from the looks of it, you would think things are hunky-dory.
You don’t even get an error page when you go through the order-submission taxonomy. All this does is confuse potential customers who may not have heard the news about SunRocket going out of business.
Yes, I know that sometimes sites stay up on the host. But don’t you think someone should substitute the landing page you’re seeing with a kind of farewell notice?
Perhaps this hasn’t been done because SunRocket is trying to sell their subscriber list. The Wall Street Journal reports today that negotiations are being held with Packet8 (8×8) to do just that. But still, why not a “we’re working on” placeholder?
This move is necessary right this minute. The longer time elapses, more SR orphans will have gone elsewhere. That would deflate the value of the subscriber list to a degree that it might no longer be salable.
Could this lack of attention be indicative of the not-so-best practices that may have been a contributing factor to SunRocket’s demise?
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
