I was catching up on technology news this weekend (after a long week in Las Vegas for conferences), and came across a Sun Microsystems advertisement for Solaris 10.

Join over 4 million others and get Solaris 10 today.
>> Download now

I have Solaris 10 on DVD already, but I thought I’d check this out and see how easy the process was. Not very. If you visit News.com, the ad will likely appear in the upper right corner.

I clicked download now, and landed on this page. Where are the file download links? Download now implies downloading now. I think we’ve all grown accustomed to this. Well, click another orange button labeled “Get It”, fill out a really long form listing which software packages you want, login with your Sun account or create one, fill in a form on how you intend to use Solaris (including the anticipated number of installations), select CD or DVD formatted files, and then download Solaris 10 in fragments for assembly on your end before finally burning to media for installation. I’m tired already!

Sun needs to seriously streamline the process of “download now” if they want to encourage user evaluation of Solaris 10. There were many steps in the process that are, no doubt, resulting in user abandonment.

My recommendation? Link “download now” to a page with all of the file links, and encourage users to submit their email address (optionally) to be notified of updates. Lead generation is taking priority here over the user experience and this is a no win for all parties. Sun nets less evaluators, the ones that do make it through the process may be frustrated before even getting to the installation process, and schmucks like me end up blogging about it.