HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders 206
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.
I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Grow up. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's almost as if a News for Nerds website had derogatory icons for Microsoft and Bill Gates, or something.
Oh, wait.
(Seriously, Slahsdot, can we grow up a bit and just have non-insulting icons for these guys? It was funny in 1998, but come ON).
Disrespecting computing pioneers... (Score:5, Insightful)
For those who say "have a sense of humor" I will say "it's not even funny, really".
Fuck Sun and HP. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again, these days it's rare to need the kind of hardware Sun or HP puts out. Several quality Opteron boxes from IBM running FreeBSD or Linux can provide the same level of service and the same reliability as a large Sun or HP system, and often at a far lower cost.
Wrong targets (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disrespecting computing pioneers... (Score:1, Insightful)
As for showing how utterly childish they are... Well oh darn. Sun is childish. I'm sure that'll really bite them in the ass when... Oh wait, no one cares.
At least they're enjoying themselves, unlike some people.
But who will think of the customers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid CEO Tricks (Score:5, Insightful)
Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole. The company's stock is still trading at under $5/share. It faces tremendous competition from above and below, and it has been shedding employees like a duck sheds water. There are times when publicity stunts like this are a good idea. For example, when you're the young upstart and you want to poke fun at the established titans of industry.
Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky, and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department. Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years. Attempts to look like a saucy underdog just make the company look pathetic.
Make kick-ass products. Give customers what they want, and then some. Ready your history. Examine how IBM, Apple, and yes, HP recovered from their missteps. Earn respect. Don't endanger it by resorting to head-scratching 9th grade pep rally moves like this.
What is going on (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab (Score:2, Insightful)
+1 Funny
Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:5, Insightful)
Devlopment on the UltraSPARC V was terminated - Sun is still working on the "Rock" prcessor - sort of a Niagara designed for large multiprocessor machines. Sun realized several years ago that processors were hitting a wall on single thread performance (compare performance gains between 1996 to 2001 vs 2001 to 2006) and emphasized multicore designs. Sun has also done some nice work with the Opteron - that combined with the Niagara are two reasons why Sun's market share has been increasing recently.
Re:Well, this makes my life a little easier. (Score:2, Insightful)
$6,000 for some cardboard? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's bad enough seeing scumbag trustfund kiddies flaunting their inherited wealth by doing nothing but ski or drive their Lamborghinis around all day, but paying $6,000 for a scrap of cardboard, just to play a prank?
The bloody revolution can't happen soon enough.
Is there no room for levity in business? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But who will think of the customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stupid CEO Tricks (Score:4, Insightful)
What makes you think Schwartz even talked to his PR people? I'm sure if he had, they would have tried to talk him out of it.
Here's an irony: recently, Schwartz sent an email to all employees, boasting that Sun doesn't "waste money" on art with which to decorate its corridors. Instead, it puts up these tacky posters where Sun employees talk about how great a place the company is to work. Just to thing to convince employees that the company isn't circling the drain!
I give Scwartz a year, tops.
"Confusing headline"? (Score:5, Insightful)
You clearly and unambiguously referred to Hewlett and Packard as Sun's founders. The headline was not "confusing", it was WRONG.
And the summary is still WRONG. It says "a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders," and these people weren't founders of any HP rival (as far as I know), they were the founders of HP, which stands for (surprise) Hewlett-Packard.
Learn to, first, recognise your mistakes, second, admit them.
Re:$6,000 for some cardboard? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe we could have a not-so-bloody revolution? Just this once? You know, we can try it out, see if we like it. I mean, if we don't like it, we could always go for number two, right?
Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:5, Insightful)
You are joking aren't you? Sun seem to be doing the only interesting CPU development at the moment. The T1 is an 8 core, 64-way SMT design specifically optimised for datacenter workloads. Its successor is going to have better floating point performance and even more parallelism. It gets the best performance per watt of any general purpose CPU for most web and database server workloads. The Rock, due out in 2008, aims for the the high-end market, and looks very promising.
I suppose the fact that they are not developing high-end servers anymore must be the reason why their market share in the server arena has increased for five quarters in a row.
The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's
The POWER5 (and, to a lesser degree, Itanium) are living in the very high-end HPC arena. This market keeps getting smaller. The T1 is in the web server and high-density datacenter market. This is an enormous growth area. At the moment, people buying large numbers of servers care about two things:
- Heat.
- Power usage.
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. Even IBM don't use it in their highest performance systems (Blue Gene and friends); they use PowerPC 405-series chips, which are much less powerful (they are mostly sold for use in mobile 'phones), but have a better performance / watt, and so they can be packed a lot more densely.Re:I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen a lot of comments like that in this comment, and I don't understand where they come from. Sun is still focussing in build quality, and making products that are a joy to use. The have one highly innovative CPU design in production, and two in development. They produce Opteron systems for the mass market, SPARC systems for HPC and T1 for the datacenter. Their UNIX variant is still under active development, and things like DTrace and ZFS are unparalleled.
HP, in contrast, had two of the best CPU designs on the market (PA-RISC and Alpha), and they let both die. They had two UNIXes, and they let both of them stagnate (although they are starting to undo this). They had an even more impressive OS in the form of OpenVMS, which ran on VAX and Alpha; they ported it to Itanium. If they'd ported it to x86 instead, then they could have sold huge numbers of systems. As it is, they've sold both of the Itanium machines sold.
Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$6,000 for some cardboard? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that sounds like you just described the average Stanfordite.
Re:But who will think of the customers? (Score:3, Insightful)
-Eric