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.

Re:...wtf?

[FuturePastNow]

No shit. The headline and summary completely misrepresent the article. It doesn't even make sense... Sun taunts HP with Sun's founders, Hewlett and Packard?

Insightful my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun and HP both sell opteron boxes like IBM does. The only difference is Sun and HP both sell superiour hardware, at a lower cost. The IBM servers (both intel and amd) are flaky as fuck, and often require windows only patches to make stable, which helps not at all when you don't run windows. Fuck, HP even donates hardware to open source projects on occasion, and their ILO kicks serious ass. I will keep buying HP proliants to run free unixes on, you can get ripped off by broken shit from IBM.

Re:You nailed it

[LarsWestergren]

but there are still big question marks, like what they actually intend to do with Java, and how they intend to operate in a world where Open Source is squeezing them in software,

They intend to open source it, they have even started working on it. [slashdot.org]

and commodity boxes are squeezing them in hardware.

They are one of the leading sellers of AMD64 boxes [xbitlabs.com], plus they are still making some really cool hardware [slashdot.org].

Re:Wrong targets

[LarsWestergren]

Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. 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.

Did you read Schwartz's blog [sun.com]?

An artist has made cutouts of famous industrialists in a hitchhiking pose with and embedded GPS and placed them out to see if they reach their intended destination.

Schwartz: "Now, not everyone thought this was a cool idea. When presented with the opportunity to purchase the likeness of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, it having made the trek from the printer ink section of a San Jose Office Depot, our friends at HP elected not to honor their founders. So out of respect for HP's legacy, the fine folks in Sun's marketing team decided to acquire the artwork. Bill and Dave are absolute legends, held in the deepest respect by all of us at Sun. We were honored at the opportunity.

So we bought them, and their garage, for $6,000. Lock, stock and Java phone."

I think decking them out in an "I love Solaris" t-shirt before placing them was more intended as a gentle tease against HP rather than mocking the memory of the founders.