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HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders 206

Posted by Zonk from the easily-riled dept.
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.
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HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders More

HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders

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  • ...wtf? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
    please tell me this is a very late april fools story
    • If you consider the spelling and grammar mistakes in the submission, it probably will be.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by iced_773 ( 857608 )
      Nah, couldn't be. No ponies.
    • Someone should remind Jonathan Schwartz of a well-known truth: people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

      In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article [theregister.co.uk] by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.

      Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The p

      • Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:4, Insightful)

        by takeaslash ( 976090 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @12:20AM (#15992202)
        n 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun. Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's. The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development. You only have half the story. The highend Ultra V was killed off so that Sun could focus on their Rock CPU for the highend. They have also extended their partnership with Fujitsu to develop the APL line, and to rebadge each others products. The T1, Ultra IV+ processors with their current Opeteron line show that the hardware division of going along very well.

      • Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:5, Insightful)

        by calidoscope ( 312571 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @12:22AM (#15992212)
        In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.


        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:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @04:43AM (#15992651) Journal
        In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers.

        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:

        1. Heat.
        2. 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: (Score:3, Funny)

          by teflaime ( 738532 )
          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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by rayzat ( 733303 )
          BlueGene runs on PPC440 cores not PPC405 cores. To the best of my knowledge 405 cores were never used in mobile phones. Most mobile phone software is designed to run on ARM processors and PPC and ARM code tend not to translate back and forth to each other very well. Never mind the fact that most of the mobile phone peripherils are designed to work with the AMBA bus and not the embedded PPC's(ePPC) PLB bus. Maybe you are referring to ePPC cores being used in chips for cell phone base stations.
          IBM's olde

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by EvanED ( 569694 )
      Of course it's not! It's a very early April fool's day story.

      Sheesh... get it right next time.

    • $6,000 for some cardboard? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      We're not even talking about "art" here, which would at least provide a spurious justification for such gross extravagance.

      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.

      • Re:$6,000 for some cardboard? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anpheus ( 908711 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @02:45AM (#15992468)
        But the blood gets everywhere then and it's terribly hard to clean out of my whites, the bleach never really gets all of it...

        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: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sethstorm ( 512897 ) *
        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?

        Well, that sounds like you just described the average Stanfordite.

  • I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ScrewMaster ( 602015 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:26PM (#15992022)
    sort of tacky to me.

    • Re:I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by stupidfoo ( 836212 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:40PM (#15992068)
      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!"

    • tacky and childish. Not exactly professional. Hopefully, if this really did happen, someone will have the decency to at least go (*mumble mumble nice-sounding words about not official policy mumble mumble we apologize mumble mumble*).

      • Re:I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:5, Funny)

        by The Mad Debugger ( 952795 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @01:15AM (#15992327)
        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.
        • Are you sure oracle should buy sun to make one super-batshit-insane CEO?! I think you are getting into cartoon supervillain territory there and would say that oracle and sun have to be kept apart at all costs! I can just imagine Larry 'Dr Collosus' Ellison as head of the new company sitting in his volcano lair/oracleSun HQ with a cat on his lap laughing as the google bigwigs are lowered into a tank of sharks.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Erectile Dysfunction ( 994340 )
        I agree. At some point it's best not to exploit the dead, and this is well beyond that point.
    • I dunno, it just seems sort of tacky to me.
      --
      Your sig: "... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.

      Pot, meet kettle...

      But you're right though. This is really sophomoric stuff. It's a pity they feel they have lower themselves to taunt their competitors instead of focusing their vision on groundbreaking products the way Hewlett, Packard and to a lesser extent, von Bechtolsheim did in their day.

      Sadly, both companies have lost that ed

      • Re:I dunno, it just seems ... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @04:58AM (#15992671) Journal
        Sadly, both companies have lost that edge, and now produce mostly bland generic products, little different to any of the mass-market offerings.

        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.

  • Grow up. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jethro ( 14165 )
    Well I'm glad to know we're all still being immature and childish.

    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).
    • I think I should expect higher standards of SUN to be professional because their hardware is targeted to the professional & enterprise markets. Sadly, SUN really doesn't live up to what their image should be.

      I don't have as high standard for Slashdot because it's more targeted towards the computer and technology enthusiasts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jethro ( 14165 )
        I agree, I'd expect more professionalism from Sun than from Slashdot, especially Slashdot circa 1995, back when that Bill Gates Borg thing was still funny. Man, I don't even remember the website it came from but it was a pretty funny one. I think it was "micros0ft.com" until they got sued and came back as "Zero-Micro Software", but this WAS 12 years ago.

        But anyway, yeah... I think we should all be over that by now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *
          Man, I don't even remember the website it came from but it was a pretty funny one.

          Bill Gates as a Borg was a ripoff from a cover of Boardwatch magazine (May 1996, according to this page [lurkertech.com]).

  • Disrespecting computing pioneers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rotten168 ( 104565 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:28PM (#15992029) Homepage
    Wouldn't it be funny if Steve Jobs painted a Groucho Marx face on Pascal and Von Neumann's cardboard cutout likenesses? Oh wait, no it wouldn't. Sun just shows how utterly childish they are with this stunt.

    For those who say "have a sense of humor" I will say "it's not even funny, really".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neo8750 ( 566137 )
      In words of George Carlin: "you don't think rape is funny? well think about this porky pig fucking elmer fudd...They don't call him porky for nothing"

      Meaning that you need not take everything so DAMN SERIOUS!

      There nothing wrong with a little fun in the workplace (or in the industry) as long as everyone is "ok" with it. Meaning no one gets hurt either physically or emotionally then its fine. With it being fine means its ok to laugh. Sure you may not find it funny because its insulting someone you ho

      • and some cardboard collector got $6000 for something that probably costs about 0.2 cents in total cardboard value.

        Everyone wins, I say.
    • Wouldn't it be funny if Steve Jobs painted a Groucho Marx face on Pascal and Von Neumann's cardboard cutout likenesses?

      Slashdot would still worship him.
    • Oh Geez. Lighten up. From what I read, it's not like they showed them sodomizing each other or anything like that. They showed them holding competitors products.

      I always get a chuckle out of things like this. Like the time the Internet Explorer guys left an Internet Explorer icon at the front door of Netscape. Whether you agree with the sentiment or not, it's nice to see that in a serious business there's room for a laugh.

      Hell, I'm a Mac user. I chuckled over the "Switch" parodies and the few "I'm a M

  • No Worky (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuturePastNow ( 836765 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:28PM (#15992031)
    Reading comprehension fail it... Slashdot's editors are unpaid volunteers, right?

  • The leading "Unix' (Score:5, Funny)

    by netrangerrr ( 455862 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:31PM (#15992037) Homepage
    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: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There must be some serious footnote action in that IDC report as well, because I don't see how HP-UX could be the leader unless they were counting "the Unix Market -- of servers in broom closets only in government facilities named after Mickey Mouse". If anything, from informal stats gleaned from looking at job listings over the past decade or so, I'd say the current state of affairs regarding demand for commercial unix is something like Solaris first (and far in the lead), followed by AIX, followed distan

  • a perfect rotating quote (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ChipMonk ( 711367 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:32PM (#15992040) Journal
    As I type this, the quote at the bottom of the Slashdot page is:

    Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may be in owning a piece thereof. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

    File this under "things that make you go 'hmmmmmmmmmm...'"

  • Cardboard cutouts of CowboyNeal ! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:35PM (#15992049) Journal
    Sure, Bill, Dave, and the Sun Founders were all once very important here in the valley,
    as were DEC, Compaq, Tandem, and everybody else absorbed by HP and Sun,
    but they represent the 1970s and 1980s computer booms and the late-90s servers.

    For this decade's cardboard cutouts, we need Web 2.0 figures, bloggers, and user-created-content wranglers, and I say who better than our own CowboyNeal!

  • I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grabass (Score:5, Interesting)

    by w33t ( 978574 ) * on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:35PM (#15992051) Homepage
    ...in the meantime our entire VMware infrastructure runs on Dell because they are actually busy making sales calls and setting up meetings with my VP ;)

  • Fuck Sun and HP. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:36PM (#15992054)
    Fuck both Sun and HP. For those of us who have real systems to worry about, this sort of bullshit between marketeers and CEOs makes us cringe. Sun could have put that $6000 to good use. That would have been enough to pay an intern for the summer, perhaps one who could have gone through and fixed some of the fairly simple OpenSolaris bugs that are still open, even months after being reported.

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ruie ( 30480 )

      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.

      And even lower if instead of buying from IBM one uses a local computer shop. Last time I looked at IBM's website one could buy two generic boxes for the price of one that IBM sells, especially if one wants to max out the RAM.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 1lus10n ( 586635 )
        Yeah, the difference is that IBM, Sun etc etc send people out to replace hardware on site. Random vendors MIGHT have a turn-around of a few weeks. Of course they also have standards compliant IPMI "LOM" stuff as well. Meaning that I usually wont have to pay someone to sit in a datacenter/noc just to reboot the system if there is an issue.

        I want you to find me a vendor with even decent warranty support who can build a 1U opteron with the SAME specs as a sun, IBM or HP for half the price.

    • Insightful my ass. (Score:2, Informative)

      by 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.

      • Partial truth... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Junta ( 36770 )
        Disclaimer: I happen to be an IBM employee

        True everyone sells similar stuff nowadays at the commodity level (putting aside HP's itanium, Sun's Ultrasparc, and IBM's power systems, which makes things more complicated), however my experience certainly shows IBM to be capable boxes without need of Windows for everything, with few exceptions. The e325/e326/e326m are out of place and may be subject to your criticism. I don't think of those servers as a sufficiently serious Opteron effort. The x336/x346/ and bl
    • Sun could have put that $6000 to good use. That would have been enough to pay an intern for the summer...

      Erm, $6k is about 1 month's direct salary as an intern, not including all the hiring and related overhead. But you're just a trolling AC anyway, so who cares about facts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bastian ( 66383 )
        Wow. If that's what interns are going for nowadays, sign me up to be an intern for life! (Or at least until the next dot compost and forces the market to realize yet again how ridiculously overpaid some folks are.)
        • Yeah - bay area, I'd see an Intern easily going for 4K a month - then 2K a month for random benefits, cost of office space, etc.

          Now if you are in Iowa - I would expect that to drop in at least 1/2, but then who would want to outsource to Iowa when you can go all the way to Bangalore and get it for 1/4 of that.

          YMMV

        • I had a pretty sweet intern deal.

          $30k/year, $10/year training budget, they flew me in, paid all my accomodation (rent, utilities, phone etc) for that year. All in all, it probably cost close to $80 big ones for that year.

    • They got $30 million of publicity for $6,000 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sun just got their name in front of damn near everyone the tech community for $6000. That kind of publicity campaign would cost millions of dollars otherwise.

      So, they did it by making fun of HP. BFD. Everyone makes fun of HP. HP's nothing more than a printer-ink-delivery company any more anyway, after Carly got through with them.

      And if you have a problem that requires a few hundred gigs of RAM, that needs to be worked on by a hundred or so CPUs, and can't be partitioned so a cluster isn't a solution, yo

  • Wrong targets (Score:5, Insightful)

    by violet16 ( 700870 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:36PM (#15992056)
    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.

    • Re:Wrong targets (Score:5, Funny)

      by craXORjack ( 726120 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @12:06AM (#15992156)
      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: (Score:2)

        by lewp ( 95638 )
        That was twice as funny as the prank, or the post describing it. Well done.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by johnny cashed ( 590023 )
      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:Wrong targets (Score:4, Informative)

      by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @06:29AM (#15992810) Homepage Journal
      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.

  • But who will think of the customers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Harmonious Botch ( 921977 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:42PM (#15992079) Homepage Journal
    These guys have lost their focus. I'm a business owner myself ( a bit smaller than Sun and HP, though ) and I would never encourage my employees to act or think like this. Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.
    • Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.

      A-friggin-men. What the hell is it with all the bloodthirst? Defeating a rival doesn't result in long-term success anyways as new rivals will just take their place. Pleasing your customers is the best long-term strategy. If your passion is pleasing others, get into business, if your passion is defeating others, go join the armed forces or UFC or something.

      Cheers.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Henry V .009 ( 518000 )
        Ayn Rand only said that because she was a kooky chick with her own cult. Many of the most creative people in history were motivated by the desire to beat others.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by crucini ( 98210 )
      Maybe their goal was to communicate the fact that HP customers are installing Solaris. A fact I found initially impossible ("Solaris runs on SPARC, not PA-RISC") and then unlikely. It's definitely something to be proud of, and this is a good way to publicize it. It's news to me that anyone voluntarily installs Solaris these days.
  • 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... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ant P. ( 974313 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:48PM (#15992103)
    At least they're wasting far too much money on their marketing department, and not their legal one.
  • I think the art (and technology) project behind this, "Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight", particularly Hewlett and Packard's travelogue [ylem.org] is more interesting than the post. Ironic how HP wouldn't allow the cutout into their lobby!

  • Sun's Founders? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:48PM (#15992106) Homepage Journal
    Wow, I never knew that Hewlett and Packard founded the Sun Microsystems company. The things you learn on Slashdot...

  • Stupid CEO Tricks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Sunday August 27, 2006 @11:56PM (#15992130) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • I agree. I think that HP will outlive Sun unless Sun shapes up, I think HP is the biggest in the enterprise hardware market right now. I think Sun has a niche somewhere, and they seem to be rapidly shrinking to fit that niche. Sun had pretty cool stuff in its time and my understanding is that they had the best long term hardware support but they simply aren't adapting well to the world of commodity parts.

    • Re:Stupid CEO Tricks (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @01:59AM (#15992406) Homepage Journal
      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 ...
      Which pretty much describes everything Schwartz does.
      ...and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department.

      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.

    • 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 seems he is doing quite well [zdnet.co.uk], They are positioned quite well for the future too, with companies like Google warning that power consumption has started to cost a lot more money than the hardware. That makes well engineered hardware [sun.com] more competetive against large numbers of cheap boxes.

    • Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole.

      So it's business as usual at Sun.

      Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years.

      The really strange, curious, and amusing thing about Sun is that this has always been true, at any given point in its history. It is quite difficult to explain why this company is still in business.

      Throughout Sun's history, its management has made endless strange and often rather stupid decisions, with the apparent goal of mak

  • the only way you can pump up your employees is to make fun of your competitor.

  • What is going on (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wannabe Code Monkey ( 638617 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @12:06AM (#15992158)
    If I wasn't so confused by the summary I'd probably think this was a really pathetic stunt by Sun. I'd also probably think it was really weird and sad that executives are fighting on their blogs.
  • That the "new" HP appears to be stamping out the "HP Way."

    Perhaps Bill and Dave would have been less than amused at Sun's antics. But IMO they'd have considered it trivial and petty.

    However the damage done to their own company by mindless expansion and aggrandization - well, lets just say they wouldn't have found that trivial and petty. More like heartless and ultimatly destructive to both the company and it's employees.

    -GregThat the "new" HP appears to be stamping out the "HP Way."

    Perhaps Bill and Dave wou

    • So this double copy-pasting is your way of saying that Bill and Dave would have been unanimous in their assessment? :-D

  • I can't believe how many slashdot readers appear to have a stick up the rear over this. Personally I find it amusing and not really offensive at all. You can tell HP which lost any sense of fun a few years ago has no real idea how to react other than very uncomfortable press releases.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rakishi ( 759894 )
      Or they're just utterly confused at what drugs caused a large company to perform such a counter-productive and down-right idiotic stunt. There is fun and there is stupid, they are not the same except to some teenagers (including mental teenagers no matter the age).
      • Come on, the guy posted a picture in a blog with a Sun shirt in front of them. This harms no one and is simply funny.

        I've been out of high school for decades but can find the humor in this. It's not like Sun TP'ed HP.

        Are you some kid fresh out of business school or what?
    • Consider >this message [ylem.org] from Sun to the artists when they asked to rescue HP's founders:

      We were shocked to hear that no one at HP wanted to welcome back the namesakes of their company, known for their personal perseverance and inventive track records in technology. We would like to return the pair to the road, in search of HP's sense of humor and a new home for HP's legacy.

      I think they need to pick up a cardboard cutout for Slashdot readers and try to help them find their sense of fun as well. Perhaps mo
  • That way it would be a straw man argument.
  • sun is dying. at least apple, for its relatively small market share (on computers, not iPods), has tremendous influence over the industry. sun is barely a pimple on the IT world's ass anymore. this is I would gather, just another example of how poorly led sun really is. sad when you think about it. one time on top of the world, dot-com mania, etc. just shows you that corporate leadership really does matter. all the brilliance in the world in engineering will not help if the suits are fsck ups.
  • ...is for a bunch of football players to show up and give all concerned Atomic Wedgies.

    Balance must be restored to the Force.

  • "Confusing headline"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Monday August 28, 2006 @02:05AM (#15992413)

    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.

  • . .

    they'd buy cardboard cutouts of Cary Fiorana and Robert Palmer - hey actually a whole bunch of them - and put them in front of HP's freaking doors. Extra cardboard men and women for every entrance to HP's Palo Alto labs.

    To anyone with any sense of corporate history, i think this trite gesture is very very bad PR. Hitting on two respected - moreover from what i understand, decent - deceased men is the impression i get. Did they try to imply Bill and Dave would prefer to walk through Sun's doors? I thin

  • The HP Way (Score:2, Interesting)

    by niceone ( 992278 )

    They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.

    - an ex-HP employee

  • The real story here is that some artists [ylem.org] painted life-sized portraits of a bunch of Silicon Valley pioneers and set them at the side of the road in Eastern USA to "hitchhike" their way across the USA. As an amusing art-project this was featured on the front page of many tech websites, including this one & Boing Boing. [boingboing.net]

    Because their founders were selected as famous & influential enough to feature for inclusion as Silicon Valley "pioneers", HP were offered first chance to sponsor this art and buy the

    • This already makes it look less childish at least! And adds a little bit more faith to sun if their employees are apparently skilled enough to work on nice projects like that in their free time.
  • Update: 08/28 04:43 GMT by Z : Fixed confusing headline.

    You... you did? O_o

  • Could someone please fix the fix? I can't understand the first like 3 sentences, they make no sense to standard English speaking peoples.

    I wonder if HP/UX has actually been used anwyhere since the early 90's. . . . i actually turned down hosting on boxes that ran HP/UX for things because it was so difficult to work with.
  • Seriously, for those poor SUNW stockholders ... how happy that must make them to see this $6000 expenditure on the books. I mean, this is not exactly a company rolling in profits. Perhaps stunts like this are one of the reasons?
  • I'm under the impression Sun is one of the rare billion dollar Palo Alto companies that did not start in a garage :-) HP, Apple, and Google did. Yahoo started in a trailer (Stanford put up lots of trailers after the 1989 earthquake closed 1/4 of the buildings.) Sun started in a grad student's office. I forget where CISCO's first office was.

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