These pages can be extremely valuable. Our competitors' home pages are among my first stops. I'm really thorough about going through them. We do business in 170 countries. Home pages can give you a quick take on what your competitor is selling in Argentina or who its partners are in Belgium.
Home pages are valuable.
But they also contain lots of misleading information. And companies tend to post only their most optimistic messages. If you're worried about when a competitor is going to release a new product, and all you do is track press releases on its home page - well, don't be surprised when the product launches much later than those releases suggested it would. All the detail on the Web can be deceiving. One of the great things about the Web is that it's a window on the world.