HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders

eastbayted writes "According to InfoWorld.com, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz boasts in his public blog that his company has bought a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, for $6,000. Sun staffers then went on to bedeck and photograph the dual portrait in pro-Sun paraphernalia. As a parting shot at HP, Schwartz notes in his post how popular a download Solaris is for HP server owners. Taking the bait, HP VP of Marketing Eric Kintz responds in his own blog that Sun's actions were 'a nice stunt' and that 'I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves.' He also cites an IDC report about how HP-UX dominates the Unix market over IBM and Sun." Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.

...wtf?

[Lehk228]

please tell me this is a very late april fools story

The leading "Unix'

[netrangerrr]

With all of the free Linuxes around, and even being touted by IBM and others, dominating the traditional 'Unix' market is rapidly becoming like being the leader in Novel IPx networking.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[stupidfoo]

And why would you be proud of the fact that customers of a competing company is buying expensive HP hardware and then downloading your OS for free? They're basically saying "Ha! Look how foolish we are! Even HP can make money off of Solaris!"

Re:...wtf?

[iced_773]

Nah, couldn't be. No ponies.

Seems like something Sun would do

[virtuald]

I don't know if the story is real or not, but it seems like something Sun would do. Check out this here, its amusing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sandyk/archive/2006/02/24/53 8832.aspx [msdn.com]

I especially like this one: "Sun Microsystems: Where Unix came to die."

In Sun's defense...

[Ant P.]

At least they're wasting far too much money on their marketing department, and not their legal one.

Sun's Founders?

[Speare]

Wow, I never knew that Hewlett and Packard founded the Sun Microsystems company. The things you learn on Slashdot...

Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab

[Informix]

Our local VMware SE recommends Sun hardware if customers actually want performance and support. He must be crazy; Dell is soooooo the market leader in technology innovation.

Re:Wrong targets

[craXORjack]

Relax. It's just fun-spirited hijinks from those crazy guys over at Sun. It's like that time that Scott McNealy and Jonathon Schwartz snuck into the Microsoft headquarters and kidnapped Goatly, the Microsoft mascot, right before their big Windows ME launch. But then the goat ate a stack of Solaris installation diskettes in the closet where they hid it, and got so sick they thought it was going to die. So they had to return it before anyone found out but old Mr. Balmer caught them and made them promise never to do anything like that again. Those kooky kids!

Re:Who do I talk to...?

[jpardey]

A cardboard cutout of anything? I'd be happy to pay more than 400 for a cardboard cutout of anything.

Now, I just need to find a good any key.

Re:...wtf?

[EvanED]

Of course it's not! It's a very early April fool's day story.

Sheesh... get it right next time.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[The Mad Debugger]

There must be something about being CEO of Sun that makes you go BATSHIT INSANE. I mean, I was thinking that once McNealy stepped down the company might get a little less goofy, but I guess that's not the case. Oracle should just buy them, so we only have to deal with one nutjob egomaniac tech CEO.

Re:Wrong targets

[johnny cashed]

But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.

You're right, we shouldn't be making fun of HP and Sun.

Oh, wait, you were refering to Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. You're right, they shouldn't be making fun of them.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[spiderbitendeath]

Do they have frickin laser beams attached to their heads?

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[teflaime]

The POWER5 is one of the worst offenders in this; it gets great performance (although not necessarily on the kind of workloads buyers are looking for), but it generates a huge amount of heat.

Man, is this ever true. I got a 550 last year and put it down in my basement and hooked a fan up to it. Ran my website and heated my house to nice and toasty 72 degrees all winter.