So much for conventional wisdom

And what about the industry’s largest players — IBM.com and HP.com? Well color us amazed.

When we decided to take a close look at leading IT communities, the conventional wisdom went like this.

Sun.com, Dell.com, and Oracle.com would rank at the top of the charts, HP.com would fall somewhere in the middle, and most newcomers (like Symantec Connect, EMC, Citrix and the like) would fall to the bottom of the list.

We weren’t quite sure where IBM.com’s newer communities would fall, but knowing IBM, we knew there would be a twist in the story.

From our perspective, the thinking was perfectly logical.

• Sun and Dell pioneered communities on the IT Web, and they’ve had years to flesh out their content & capabilities —and learn from early mistakes.
• Oracle has long been a leader in developing community award programs and its Mix community has been an interesting trendsetter for the past 18 months.
• HP.com’s massive industry footprint and strong consumer roots would surely deliver at least a moderately effective catalog of communities.
• IBM always measures twice and cuts once before making these kinds of bold online commitments – and then throws in a ringer to create a bit of competitive chaos.

As for the rest, we figured that most of these communities would be crafted out of murky objectives or be “Franken-communities” lashed together out of pieces and parts observed on other sites.

When the results were in, conventional wisdom turned out to be dead wrong.

• SAP.com and Intel.com — both built on totally different platform approaches — tie for first place, proving that architecture isn’t the key to building and operating world-class communities.

• Sun.com ranks second overall based on its massive size, but delivers truly dreadful usability results.

• Symantec.com and Dell.com round out the top five with better than average performances and interesting lessons worth learning.

And what about the industry’s largest players — IBM.com and HP.com? Well color us amazed. When 429 criteria were evaluated and 35 usability issues were considered, IBM.com’s over-engineered offering lands in seventh place – but delivers an important paradigm shift that shouldn’t be missed (the twist) — and HP.com’s current community chaos ranks dead last.