HP has sent a letter to Sun that complains about the inflammatory nature of Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog entries, according to this report. Apparently it is in response to Schwartz saying that HP’s Unix operating system is dying.
HP sends letter to muzzle Sun’s Schwartz
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
and critized Sun’s flip-flop attitude toward Linux.
…Seems like a lot of system vendors are standing on a wire, tottering back and forth. I think that Linux is about to explode into the desktop/workstation market. (I mean, it obviously has been gaining in popularity at a good pace, but when I say explode, I mean jumps in high single to double digit percentage points within a short amount of time – say this coming fiscal year (starting in Jan.)).
This is a good time for projects like Knoppix, Mepis, Ubuntu, etc. to get a solid, simple desktop system put together and beef up their marketing of services. I think that both Sun and HP are itching to dive in full throttle, but also wary that this might hurt them in some way (see the recent OSNews posting about Unix vs. Linux).
I mentioned the more stripped distributions instead of Mandrake, Suse, Fedora, which are over-rich in applications. People at a desk should only be given what they NEED to get their work done.
That being said, my desktop at work is so non-standard that if I have a problem, support tells me to get lost and fix it myself. Heh heh.
Mike
Their arrogance is astounding…
All I see them doing is discrediting themselves and alienating the community. Between dising Redhat and HP, IBM and Novell, and going to bed with Microsoft, it’s clear Sun is the enemy.
All I have to say is… my word of mouth is much better advertising than Sun could ever buy. And as it stands, I won’t recommend Sun because of the company itself.
you simply do not understand the business world. People just dont get it. IBM screws you with the billion dollar licence agreements, Novell just bought linux companies but still not sure what is he doing with them, HP is a wintel company, Redhat is a shamelss linux packager. Most of the other linux distributions has no power in business desktops. i think only Sun is doing a good job on that… And by the way, if there is someone who goes to bed with Microsoft, it is not Sun, but Mr. Miguel Icaza…
>>IBM screws you with the billion dollar licence agreements
What?!?
>>Novell just bought linux companies but still not sure what is he doing with them
Um lets see they’re launched SLES 9 a little while ago and plan to introduce Novell’s Open Enterprise Server which will be a combo of SLES and Netware.
Also their new Linux desktop is being released in the next month. They’ve already started more parternships (in paticular with IBM/HP to offer their distro preloaded in workstations) and bought 2 support centers (they are going to be offering nationwide Linux support).
I think their on track.
>>HP is a wintel company
What a stupid thing to say. Using your logic IBM is also Wintel company.
IBM is pushing Linux hard
HP is pushing Linux hard
Dell is riding the fence
>>Redhat is a shamelss linux packager.
Now I know your trolling. Red Hat, the company that is 100% opensource. Everything they develop/buy (*cough AOL’s Netscape server software), they opensource. They fund projects like Gnome, Gstreamer, ete and to boot, they had a 70% increase in profits when compared to last year.
Red Hat is a fantastic company.
>>Most of the other linux distributions has no power in business desktops.
Er Mandrake? You remember the deal with the French goverement?
So your bitching that the other 300 or so distros can’t get into the business desktop? Well duh, what do they offer? No support, no security(how do I know if the company is going to go bust in the next year), etc.
>>i think only Sun is doing a good job on that…
The only thing Sun is good at, is FUD and pissing away billions of dollars. Its a company full of idiots, who one day are praising the value of Linux and then the next are screaming things like “Red Hat is proprietary”, and try to push their zombie OS (first they kill Solaris X86 and then they bring it back). Also what happened to SPARC, eh? Oh thats right now your pusing AMD. Nice!
Sun is a small fish in a big pond(X86 market). I sincerly hope IBM/HP/Dell shread Sun to pieces.
>>And by the way, if there is someone who goes to bed with Microsoft, it is not Sun, but Mr. Miguel Icaza…
Miguel has been a VERY important figure is OSS.
Mono has a legitimate purpose and is/will be very imporatant. Plain and simple.
Bleh so many mistakes. I can’t even see the keyboard, its so dark.
A screaming idiot who talks a good game while vaporizing shareholder equity.
You have to go to someone like Steve Case to find someone who has vaporized more shareholder wealth than Sun execs.
Anyways, that’s just irrelevant. Sun’s stock price is not going back to it’s end of 90’s level, however much Schwartz criticizes RedHat, HP, IBM, Linux or anybody else.
He should just get down to work and shut up his stupid, arrogant blog. Walk the talk, not talk the walk.
I agree with Schwartz on all counts against HP. HP is in a real pickle with their server and OS strategy right now. It looks like killing off PA-RISC and Alpha was a huge mistake along with scrubbing of Tru64 and overreliance on Intel/Linux. HP is now becoming just another retail outlet for commodity Intel gear, exactly where it will be beaten by Dell — HP fails to differentiate itself of other white box manufacturers and the same time loosing the technical edge to Sun and IBM. Dell could deliver a pretty deadly blow to HP anytime by just adopting Linux, what HP is going to do than? The HP’s savior that could have come in a form of Itanium is going nowhere fast — chances of industry wide adoption of Itanic are slim to none and HP have recently proved that with scratching off of the entire workstation product line (ouch!). The overwhelming majority of high end system consumers prefer SPARC or Power to rather feeble Itanic. Lack of investment into HP-UX made HP’s home grown OS to lag behind the competition by about two years, I lost all hopes of HP-UX catching up to Solaris anytime soon (Solaris 10 absolutely rocks!). Bottom line HP is becoming a shadow of former self, which is a rather pathetic site for a big and powerful company I so deeply respected — way to go Carly!
Sorry, HP has cut everything to do with HP-UX, from R&D, the number of staff.
I said it once, and I’ll say it again, HP is nothing more than a Microsoft lackey. Get a HP “consultant” in a room, and within five seconds they’ll be ramming a Windows solution down your throat faster than you can say Blaster. IBM, btw is just as made, instead of coming up with a plan, they’ll claim they can integrate the new system with the old, why? because its complex, complexity means more money for IBM global services.
About the only thing that sucks at SUN is their marketing and their sales team. If it were me, I would not only fire the manager of marketing, I would fire the manager incharge of sales, neither of them have the pitt bull attitude of taking on HP or IBM. SUN *really* need to take a leaf out of the Microsoft marketing and sales book.
You’ll never again hear McNealy or Schwartz say anything negative about Microsoft. It cost Gates $2 billion, but it must have been worth it. Obviously Sun is never again going to make a single cent on PC software (except by selling Microsoft sofware), end of story here…
Sun is really cornered now, let’s see how Schwartz manages the implosion.
@kaiwai: they already fired their marketing team a long time ago at Sun. Now firing the entire sales team has never been tried at any major corporation, why is that? Ah yes, it’s because it’s a stupid thing to do.
I’m an admin at a shop that runs HPUX, AIX, and Solaris. I have the misfortune of being the primary HPUX admin.
10 years ago, if you’d have asked me what the best Unix solution was, I wouldn’t have hesitated to tell you HP. The hardware was rock-solid, HPUX was the most featureful Unix going, and their support was unbeatable. As far as admining the stuff went, it was a snap. They were the Macintosh of the Unix world.
These days, anytime I hear HP, the word “nightmare” comes to mind. Their hardware breaks at least 3 times as often as the Sun and IBM stuff, their service personel are usually clueless (although, to be fair, they still have some pretty hot techs on the payroll, but getting ahold of one is pot luck), and HPUX, while it still has a lot of nice features, appears to have stagnated, especially in comparison with AIX or Solaris.
At this point, we’ve been screwed by HP so many times our procurement people refuse to buy anymore HP stuff. Most of it is getting replaced with IBM, which is fine by me, because I have less problems with the IBM stuff than with anything else in the house. Solaris is a pretty nice OS too, but Sun’s hardware has started to get a little sketchy over the last couple of years, as well. But I’d still say they stand head and shoulders over HP.
>Sun is really cornered now, let’s see how Schwartz manages the implosion.
I thinks you’re about 2 years late with this comment, Sun is doing much better nowadays. Sun has got very good if not the best story going with both hardware and software (midleware + OS) compared with the other systems companies (IBM and HP).
and except on Sun’s own SPARC servers, Solaris is going nowhere. Meanwhile, IBM has reorganized its entire product line, RedHat has established a significant mind share and Carly Fiorina has trimmed HP’s fat to the bone. How does that leave Sun in a better competitive position than two years ago?
Or do you really think data center managers care about Looking Glass and Schwartz’s used car salesman blog talk?
Look at Sun’s stock value and you’ll notice that since bottoming out two years ago, it has never recovered. But I guess you know better than the market, right?
>Look at Sun’s stock value and you’ll notice that since bottoming out two years ago, it has never recovered. But I guess you know better than the market, right?
Time to crawl out from under that proverbial rock! Sun has just posted a profit, showed the biggest unit shipment increase out of all server vendors out there, and is enjoying a steady increase in stock prices — the worst times seem to have passed for Sun and the biggest threat right now are the senseless blurbs from ignorant people.
> Solaris is going nowhere
Solaris 10 is best most advanced and most full featured OS out there bar none. Linux has some serious milage to do before catching up to Solairs. Now Solaris 10 smokes Linux on the benchmarks running even running on the same el cheapo x86 hardware. And oh yeah, Solaris is almost 2 times cheaper than Linux to license and support. With zones, ZFS, and dtrance Solaris is a few years ahead of any cometition in the server space. If anything I forsee a pretty good increase in Solaris market share when version 10 becomes fully available. Time to pull your head out of you ass buddy.
> RedHat has established a significant mind share
RedHat’s biggest and only asset is Linux hype, RedHat has little to offer in technological value or R&D — Linux flag waving is the biggest contribution from RedHat to Linux community. It’s IBM and Sun who are the real corporate contributors to Linux and OSS in general.
Which benchmarks do you refer to?
Sun AND HP are morons. As correctly pointed out elsewhere by Gates, no less, they could have forged a standard UNIX to take on Microsoft (and even Linux) YEARS ago. Then they could have open-sourced that and made even more money by reducing their own investment in the base OS maintenance, leaving that to the community, and concentrating on differentiating value in added-on system management and other utilities.
But no – both Fiorina and McNealy are “Not Invented Here” types who don’t understand what they’re doing.
So now they’re BOTH irrelevant. Gates in his talk was right – in ten years, it will be Windows and Linux (with Linux winning or at least starting to win) – both Sun and HP UNIX versions will be irrelevant. Sure, there will be companies still using them – just as some companies still use other obsolete crap these days – but no new clients, as everyone will see they’re on the way out.
It’s OVER for Sun Solaris and HP/UX. OVER. Period.
And AIX will follow, as even IBM has occasionally admitted.
I also ran some benchmarks myself and was able to squeeze out better performance out of the same hardware using Solaris 10 b65 than RHEL 3.
—-
You want all of us to believe your personal benchmark?. If you are pitching the new stuff from SUN, try doing it with the latest from other vendors. How about suse or redhat’s latest versions instead of rhel with an year old product where 2.6 kernel and others have improved an order of magnitude better.
> How about suse or redhat’s latest versions instead of rhel with an year old product where 2.6 kernel and others have improved an order of magnitude better.
Get a grip, there isn’t much in real life performance improvements in 2.6 kernel compared with 2.4 unless you run large databases. That’s the reason even RedHat is slow to push 2.6 over 2.4.
Fiorina has almost killed what HP once was. They used to make robust hardware, had a very nice CPU design (PA-RISC) and an almost bearable operating system (HP-UX). Now they’re just a Dell competitor, selling mediocre hardware and a failed processor (Itanium). Excellent job Carly, HP will be trading under a dollar by next year.
… a properly configured Solaris box, period. BTW the V20z is just a Newisys design with Sun’s label tacked on top. Funny that it outperforms all Sun quad-SPARC servers by a good margin…
> A properly configured Linux dual Opteron box will always outperform a properly configured Solaris box, period
Don’t kid yourself, Solaris on x86 performance might have been less than optimal on Solaris 8 and early releases of Solaris 9, but the latest improvement in Solaris pretty much erased the difference. Solaris 10 is already starting to kick Linux’s ass even with just a generic x86 build, when amd64 build comes out I don’t even have any doubts that Solaris will be on top.
Who really care about the performance of a system as long as they are good enough.
What really matters to me is
1) Stability – NO COMPROMISE only a fool would do that
2) Scalability – NO COMPROMISE
3) Features – and how easy it is to use them
4) Clean and mean
5) Standard based – no stupid/non-portable proprietary way of doing things (because you never know what the future is made of)
Sun’s Solaris have all that COMPLETELY fulfilled
*I* say :”There is no future for HP/UX”. Not because of what HP exec/HP marketing try to make us believe but it is only based on facts. It has been a long long time since HP released new version of HP/UX (except from bug fixes and small enhancements). And their PA-Risc CPU is in the same situation it is dead. So you could argue that Itanium shall be the cornerstone of their future hardware but this CPU is build on bad algorithms/methode it will never take off the ground. The Itanium story is already dying…
So yes, I think HP is turning themself into a dell like company which is a shame and a betrayal of all what HP used to be.
*I* say: IBM case is more complicated. THEY are smart… they are keeping a low profile meanwhile they are developing the future of the servers CPU (the POWER line). About Linux and the OSS, they are still (at least publicly) commited to AIX AND MS Windows (never close a door keep you safe) but they are preparing the future of their Unix line on solely Linux
*I* say: Sun does not and do not have to be afraid of IBM at the moment, bu the future of Sun is getting unclearer as the times past while the IBM Unix/Server line is becoming clearer as the time goes on.
I have a quite different opinion on the capabilities and future of Itanium. Although not as successfull as Intel wants, Itanium2 is a very powerfull CPU. Just have a look at http://www.aceshardware.com/SPECmine/top.jsp. The 1,5 GHz Itanium2 is on par with the 1,9 GHz Power5 on integer performance. For floating point performance the Power5 is the clear leader, but the Itanium2 offers more performace per MHz. And the Itanium roadmap is very impressive. In next years we will see Itanium performance going up and prices going down. Intel promised for 2007 same price for Xeon and Itanium processors.
For HP Itanium is a very good replacement for the PA-RISC processors. From performance point of view a single core Itanium2 is equal to a dual core PA-8800. Now the same HP-UX 11i v2 is running on both CPUs and the new HP9000 servers are Itanium compatible (the PA-RISC CPU module can be replaced with an Itanium module).
For me Unix is more a philosophy than a brand or product. Linux, *BSD, commercial Unix products, all are part of the same family. Therefor I don’t see the future of Unix so dark. There is a mutual influence between members, they are competing and cooperating in the same time. I know well HP-UX and Solaris, I am using them in my everyday work. There are areas where one is better than the other, but I can’t say that there is a clear winner. Of course I have my favorite, but this is not relevant in this discussion. I think that Sun is making a lot of noise around Solaris, while HP is too quite about HP-UX.
.. to many people around here saying “Solaris is dying” as well
what about if one columnist wrote the same line “HP-UX is dying” on some newspaper, will HP send a letter to the editor??
There is absolutely no argument that Itanium has some potential in its architecture, but the amount of baggage associate with it such as the need for recompilation to get any decent performance and heavy reliance on quality comilers to do the job make it an absolute no-goer. Preserving backward compatibility is still the key factor, if Intel thought they could just dupe the market into Itanium dream, they made a huge mistake (which they did). I think Itanium is about to enter the books as the most expensive failure in chip making history.
@kaiwai: they already fired their marketing team a long time ago at Sun. Now firing the entire sales team has never been tried at any major corporation, why is that? Ah yes, it’s because it’s a stupid thing to do.
Nice to see you ignored this tit-bit from my post: , I would fire the manager incharge of sales
Take a comprehension class next time sunshine.
There is lie, damn lie and there is statistics
Which I would replace, in the computer world, by benchmark.
Solaris/Sparc may not shine on bechmark, but in the real life it is very good.
I cannot, will not, say the best because it is irrelevant.
What is relevant, from a hardware point of view, is that the speed is good enough that the future of this specific hardware exists. (perenniality of the solution)
Just see what most people are buying…it is not machines running HP-UX. HP-UX is going the same way the Itanium processor is. Also look around the web, very few sites about HP-UX, etc.. The writing has been on the wall for some time. It’s a slow death.
Get a grip, there isn’t much in real life performance improvements in 2.6 kernel compared with 2.4 unless you run large databases. That’s the reason even RedHat is slow to push 2.6 over 2.4.
—-
Hello?. tell that to someone who doesnt manage a whole data center with linux machines. we certainly have a great different across desktops servers and everywhere else. get your crap elsewhere
>>Now they’re [HP] just a Dell competitor, selling mediocre hardware and a failed processor (Itanium). Excellent job Carly, HP will be trading under a dollar by next year.<<
Have you forgotten about the ink-jet cartridge and laser-jet toner business? That’s where the real money is. Hardware and OSes are too competitive.
> Hello?. tell that to someone who doesnt manage a whole data center with linux machines. we certainly have a great different across desktops servers and everywhere else. get your crap elsewhere
Ditto. I manage roomfuls of servers (Solaris, Linux, and Windows). I don’t see any reason moving to 2.6 kernel from 2.4 unless you’ve got a really big server running database applications.
Solaris 10 is best most advanced and most full featured OS out there bar none. Linux has some serious milage to do before catching up to Solairs. And oh yeah, Solaris is almost 2 times cheaper than Linux to license and support. With zones, ZFS, and dtrance Solaris is a few years ahead of any cometition in the server space.
Unfortunately, this is something Sun don’t seem to understand either. The already good Sun hardware and Solaris features are not enough to keep their customers as it stands. Putting more of this stuff in isn’t going to stop that.
And oh yeah, Solaris is almost 2 times cheaper than Linux to license and support.
Based on what?
RedHat’s biggest and only asset is Linux hype, RedHat has little to offer in technological value or R&D
Now I know you’re a clueless Sun pundit. Oo, let’s talk about Red Hat. Everyone knows Red Hat is Linux!
Sun are facing the commoditisation of Solaris and even their SPARC business. They need to get to grips with that first. Technical features mean nothing I’m afraid.
Now Solaris 10 smokes Linux on the benchmarks running even running on the same el cheapo x86 hardware.
Tests with Oracle on Linux and Solaris tell a very different story. Solaris is a SPARC OS, period.
> And oh yeah, Solaris is almost 2 times cheaper than Linux to >license and support.
>
> Based on what?
Based on the prices for licensing and support for RedHat, SuSE and Sun. Just talk to any sales person in Sun, they’ll cut any deal from RedHat or SuSE in half for you — this is what they did for the company I work for. I hear this is the new strategy at Sun right now, Sun will always be cheaper on licensing and support than any major Linux vendor. Good going, Sun.
> Technical features mean nothing I’m afraid.
May be for clueless Linux kidos, technical features is everything in the professional world.
anyone in any remotely reasonable enterprise situation customises their installation. you think enterprise customers use standard Windows install CDs? of course not. if enterprises use distros like Red Hat, SuSE or Mandrake they’re hardly going to go with a default install. They’ll build their own customised installations with their own choice of packages. All three distributions make this possible.
ah, so what you’re saying is, Sun is in the same position as Microsoft – they’ll heavily undercut Linux pricing even if it means making a loss because they’re so scared of Linux they want to keep it out of the market at any cost? Yup, there’s solid proof they have a great product…
Whats really ironic is that Sun is good with OSS software, in some areas. Their support for OSS software on Solaris x86 is awesome; they donate machines to developers, pick up bandwidth costs and help with packaging.
alot of “anti-sun-releasing-opensource-programs” people here (people who criticize sun on open source. GET OVER IT!!
HP-UX IS going to die! HP does not care about Operating systems anymore or it seems they don’t. Who would want to invest in HP-UX when they could use Solaris?? WHO? A dumb@$$ would.
HP is nowhere the “expensive but rock-solid” company it used to be. I have been really surprised how mediocre the HP-UX servers are. As a student, I used to respect HP immensely.
Not anymore. HP is becoming a Wintel company, and a pretty bad one at that.
“inflammatory nature of Jonathan Schwartz’s Weblog entries”
FREEDOM IS SPEECH IS GREAT ISNT IT! Looks like people want to censor other people that bash their company.
Well if HP feels that way, lets have all the linux people censored from bashing any company or group.
uh-huh. for the last quarter for which they posted results, Sun posted a $700m profit. not bad. for the quarter before that, a $700m loss. i guess 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…
regardless, my point is that arguing that the fact that sun are willing to cut their prices in order to compete with Linux in some sense proves that their product is superior is a somewhat bizarre line to take.
I may be wrong, but I think you are doing 2+2 and coming out
with 5. The point being made was not that Sun have a superior
product because it’s cheaper. Sun are constantly criticised
for being more expensive and proprietory. The reality is
that there is not much in it when licensing the OS (they
both now run on the same ‘commodity’ hardware). The ‘Linux
is cheaper’ argument is now a fatuous one in my opinion.
from Kodak about Java.
Honestly, Sun management should get a reality check from time to time.
The patent application is frivolous at best, at worse Schwartz was smoking something very special indeed.
The Kodak patent lawsuit loss is significant because Sun is supposed to be very strict about IP, and they completely goofed on that one. They will, of course, appeal, but dragging on a lawsuit from Kodak is not a good thing.
HP is right: Schwartz should stop blogging about other companies’ products and get down to work fixing things at Sun. But I guess he is so full of himself he just can’t help it…
>> Solaris is going nowhere
> Solaris 10 is best most advanced and most full featured OS out there bar none. Linux has some serious milage to do before catching up to Solairs.
Um, quite debatable. Solaris has much better kernel debugging tools, but Linux has things like lids and grsec and selinux. Both have their strengths and weaknesses. You could also argue that a good number of more obscure operating systems have advances that neither Linux nor Solaris do. A major strength, but also a major weakness of both is their Unix heritage; it’s a system with serious design flaws, even if you consider it the best of the current major offerings.
> And oh yeah, Solaris is almost 2 times cheaper than Linux to license and support.
Nonsense. Linux != “red hat enterprise linux”. That number is pure sillyness. If it were true, I’m sure companies like google would be using Solaris, not Linux…
Linux is available for free. Support? Depends who you decide to get it with, by anyone. While I’m aware that many companies don’t like not having a support contract, for some that’s an option – there is a huge amount of linux information readily available. There are also a wide variety of vendors ready to sell linux support contracts.
Linux can initially be acquired for free. You can throw money away on a “linux solution”, but the same is true for any other platform. Linux offers more flexibility.
> With zones, ZFS, and dtrance Solaris is a few years ahead of any cometition in the server space.
dtrace, not dtrance. Solaris has always had impressive features, but some, like streams, have really been of debatable value.
> If anything I forsee a pretty good increase in Solaris market share when version 10 becomes fully available.
Doubtful.
> RedHat’s biggest and only asset is Linux hype, RedHat has little to offer in technological value or R&D — Linux flag waving is the biggest contribution from RedHat to Linux community. It’s IBM and Sun who are the real corporate contributors to Linux and OSS in general.
IBM and Sun are good for mainstream credibility, perhaps. RedHat has been a useful company. I don’t use their distro, but I appreciate the contributions they’ve made to linux.
I used to be a Sun vendor. Their distributors screwed me, time and again. Over and over. They’d take clients for their own as soon as they got wind of what we were up to in sales and even had the gall to say that we were out of our depth on a couple. That stung.
They released a long string of software that was half-finished. Their firewall, IPX to IP conversion, NFS for Windoze are a few examples. The products shipped buggy and slow, and never got better – in many cases, they were never even updated to a usable state. This left us as the vendor on the hook for software that Sun never shipped working versions of. This hurt.
Sun’s performance for the dollar was outrageously low. This started kicking us out of Sun/Solaris shops moving away from Sun in about 1999. This burned our ass, since Sun kept harping on “throughput”.
Sun end-of-lifed its machines agressively, and once they are end-of-lifed, Sun jacked the price of yearly support up so high that the customer might as well just buy new hardware. This was a money grab, and it incensed our customers.
Solaris underperformed. And came without much flexibility at all, right up to Solaris 9. A UNIX without a compiler. World’s slowest (though perhaps to give them credit, safest) filesystem. Tuning features that required an OS restart. Patching and packaging system interface from the 80s – at best. Egads.
$1,200 for a 100Mbps ethernet card, for a while there. Need I say more? Use someone else’s PCI card and Sun would drop full support for the machine.
2 years to fix the NFS bug that chose the last IP address on a virtually-IP-aliased interface instead of the first, which would destroy plenty of networks. 2 *years*.
Java appliances that never worked. Java Desktop that was dropped like a dirty shirt. Promises made… we got a mention as being the first vendor in history to sell a 200+ Java desktop solution to a school… and then watched Sun’s half-assed software and it’s less than half-assed support of it throw the whole thing – including our good name – into the dumpster. IPX and SMB software they purchased for the Windows systems in the school network also leaked memory, crashed, etc. etc. and Sun never came good for the fixes.
Sun sucks. It’s not new. Anyone who *really* knows Sun outside the running of databases or verticle HPC knows that Sun has dropped the ball again, and again, and again. Once SGI started stealing Sun’s talent back in the day, Sun never recovered. Sun’s forte is talking crap about its competitors and promising things it won’t or can’t deliver.
That’s the real Sun. I learned the hard way.
Ummmm… actually we do. Standard XP with standard applications. We then add home-grown apps for data management and customer tracking. All our other apps are web-based.
Mike
> Linux is available for free. Support? Depends who you decide to get it with, by anyone. While I’m aware that many companies don’t like not having a support contract, for some that’s an option – there is a huge amount of linux information readily available. There are also a wide variety of vendors ready to sell linux support contracts.
> Linux can initially be acquired for free. You can throw money away on a “linux solution”, but the same is true for any other platform. Linux offers more flexibility.
LOL. Try telling that happy story to a CIO, I bet you’ll get kicked out of the discussion room before you finish the first sentense. Businesses *want* solid support and commitment from the vendor. I’m afraid even RedHat is not quite up to this task yet — RedHat’s support absolutely sucks compared to Sun. Customers get told by RedHat engineers that they will post the cusotmer’s question to some developer forum and that is the best support they can provide??!! RedHat has got a long way to go before they can provide quality support and the scary part is that RedHat is the best in this arena — I can only imagine how crappy the support can be from lesser known Linux vendors. Sorry, but Sun, IBM and HP are the only shops worth considering at the moment.
You are getting your quotes wrong, ’cause I didn’t write the post your are replying to.
Anyways I think you are gross and your posts are worthless.
> You are getting your quotes wrong, ’cause I didn’t write the post your are replying to.
>
> Anyways I think you are gross and your posts are worthless.
Your brain is worthless, I wasn’t replying to you directly, I was replying to a post with a subject line “RE: Andrew” — connect the dots you freaking nimrod. You always switch to personal insults when you don’t have anything intelligent to say?
You tool, it was the *customer* that Sun wasn’t supporting. We were the vehicle to try and get Sun to do something. We had customers in health care and middle government, and Sun, beyond replacing hardware quickly, totally failed the customers in software quality. Fixing bugs *IN THE OS* has nothing to do with Sun treating a small company like dirt, it has to do with *Sun*.
These things happened, and Sun really did drop the ball over and over again up to the present day – just take a look at their current market share. So please, pull cranium from rectum and realize that Sun has real problems.
BTW, you have no idea how painful it was for me to switch those customers over to Windows. I hate Microsoft and everything it’s done with a passion (I was an Amiga geek before I grok’d *nix).
Now thankfully we are doing some custom Linux installs into these companies. We still have the business because when we all discovered how Sun was dropping the ball, we did the right thing: moved them over to something that worked (ugh, it’s hard to say that) as expected.
Okay, the comments about being too small are just lame. It is still negligent for a someone to treat any company no matter how big or small. I love it when Cisco treats me like garbage after buying nearly $1 million on one order alone. We are still clearly “too small” for them to matter about. Sure, I understand them not being too thrilled about the cost of supporting someone who only runs one machine, but it doesn’t make it acceptable to do that. They need to suck up the cost and smile about it.
As for the general nature of the comments that the Sun Exec(s) have made and likely will make in the future, I can’t really see why HP (et al) would be dumb enough to even send a letter. Tactically, even if it is false, justifying it with a response is just a bit disturbing. Do they regularly read executive’s blogs trolling for info? Are they feeling so insecure/defensive that comments like that actually worry them? I admit, he should have perhaps supplied some fact-based (if you can call statistics “facts”, that is another issue) backup for what he was saying, but it was a blog, not an in-depth report.
As for the general moves by HP, I have been deeply sickened to the point of literally feeling like throwing up when I read of each new and more idiotic move the HP Execs seem to make. HP’s current CEO is the first non-engineer to head HP and it shows. The CEO clearly lacks the understanding of what got HP where it was. The Test and Measurement divisions precision was the hallmark of their operations. You payed more for HP, but you knew you were getting the best in the 90s. Nowdays its just like Dull (Dell). I still find it amazing to look at the SPEC numbers the Alpha can manage to pull down. If you look at how impressively the Alpha 21364 at 1.3GHz (SPECint 904/994, SPECfloat 1279/1684) you just have to view with some degree of awe how well it still does even though HP hasn’t spent a dime advancing it other than what the air tight government contracts they inherrited have required them to do. I shudder to think how well it would be doing if HP realized early on that Alpha should be the horse they should ride on and invested in it the same effort the put into Itanium. I think it would just be amazing to see how well it could have done if they spent the billions on it they spent on other things. The same goes for PA-RISC.
Just my 2 cents
Nonsense. Linux != “red hat enterprise linux”.
Wrong. For all intents and purposes, RHEL is the only Linux corporations use. The 1% exceptions are negligeable enough for me to disregard.
Did I already tell you what crappy support experience we had with RedHat? NOT worth the money.
Sure some dealer are idots, sure Sun have *strange* behaviour more than sometimes sure their hardware/software are not bug free BUT *I* do believe they, globaly, have the best overal Unix experience.
We have all already been confronted with one or the other of those issue at some point but when I needed their support I faced a excellent support infrastructure AND competencies.
When *I* required a rebate on some deals they played fair and flexible.
When *I* requested some help for some part of the infrastructure because we did not have the internal knowledge yet they did not try to screw me but really helped. And their behaviour were inline with what they say. They did not try to remove (or complain at it all the time like MS does) all our non Sun systems but understodd our needs and from where we came to where we tend to go.
In brief I am sure there is issue with them as with the others (HP and IBM) but I do trust them and their products.
Really, the best overall UNIX experience…
You haven’t tried their Firewall product. Or any of their other buggy, second rate programs. Solaris and Java are pretty much the only things they had that work.
For example, to do NAT on their firewall product, you had to manually force ARP entries onto the interfaces for any further aliases you needed for reverse arp. And if you were lucky, it was stable for an afternoon.
Ugh. Sorry, once you move past Sun’s core competencies (database, print, NFS), you start running into molasses with their products. The other vendors that write software for Sun often aren’t better… for example, an “enterprise” accounting package that created a /tmp/<random> file for every view and never cleaned them up… which regularly nuked the tiny little default partition that Solaris installs for the root file system (I didn’t install this machine, as I never follow Sun’s crippled and bloated default layout).
Disksuite can’t recover gracefully from a mirror rebuid on the boot partition. Solaris can’t update a mirrored root partition. Ack.
Makes me question whether these people posting have actually USED Solaris and other Sun products.
Hey Shaman, get a load of this “This is not a sports/GT car, post this topic in the mainstreamers section”, does sound familiar, doesn’t it? It looks like pathologically pessimistic Shaman has made his way from caranddriver.com forums to OSnews, damn. Is there at least a streak of optimizm in you or at least a hint of ability to see things not only in black and white? Come on, you’ve made an ass out of yourself on caranddriver.com enough times, why start here…
Your nitpicking on some of the Sun products you previously pointed out doesn’t mean anything. Any company regardless how good has made mistakes or had products in its pipeline that were less than good and may be deserved being taking to the field and shot, the same applys to Sun — some products were bad, but the overwhelming majority were and are pretty damn good. You seem to have got some sort of preconceived notion and may be fanaticism against Sun, which is just not healthy in relation to anything. Bottom line, leave your nitpicking and emotional baggage to yourself and post only something constructive and reasoned instead of “your own” experiences.
“Bottom line, leave your nitpicking and emotional baggage to yourself and post only something constructive and reasoned instead of “your own” experiences.”
Hmmm, isn’t that exactly what HP was trying to tell Schwartz in their letter?
Gosh, what goes around comes around, doesn’t it?
Wow, is that you anonymous?
And uh… yeah, when someone talks about trucks in a sports/gt car forum, I’ll be posting my complaint as usual. Or a front wheel drive car, too. F.U.
So can we expect Solaris 10 to have good hardware support on x86? It seems to have been a problem with Solaris 9.
You can expect reasonable hardware support for the Newisys reference platform, because that’s what Sun’s v20 is based upon.
What you cannot expect is the same level of hardware support you’ll find under Linux. So don’t expect to be able to easily run Solaris 10 on your homebuilt A64 box.
For all Solaris x86 questions and support see Andrew. If he
doesn’t know he will just make it up all the same.
Funny – but a little late in the topic, no? But, wait, is that a Sun employee? Yes! Go ahead Jon, tell us how great x86 hardware support is going to be in Solaris 10.
IF I was in a position to be able to do that then I would do.
However, I am not so I chose not to post instead of posting
speculation. What I do know is that Solaris10 x86 hardware
support will be better than previous versions (fi, it
runs fine on my HP nc9000 laptop).