Merrill Lynch Rips Sun

cosjef writes "In an open letter to Sun, an analyst for Merrill Lynch tells Sun to change or risk adding itself to the junkyard of formerly-great technology companies like DEC or Data General. The letter even recommends taking the helm away from McNealy, whose 'brash and contrarian personality have been synonymous with the company's image and success. Unfortunately, the act is getting old.' Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future."

Comments

Translation: short Sun

[wowbagger]

tr = new Translation(from = Marketspeak, to = English)

tr < OpenLetterToSun
I have shorted the shit out of Sun stock, and now I want it to go down like a Clinton Intern. I will now rip you a new one in an "open" letter targeted not at Sun but rather at the sheeple who day trade.

Once your stock price bombs out, I will make a killing, then buy in at the lower price. After that, expect another "open" letter praising Sun to the heavens, in order to pump the stock back up.

God, I love being a market manipulator^Wanalyst.
<EOF>

delete tr;

Hi! I just started being a spammer!

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided to become a spammer. After reading the libertarian polemics here on slashdot I reLized I should start spamming.

You see as a libertarian the free market is king. So if I can make a ton of cash by spamming no one can tell me not to. If you don't like it go find a spam filter.

I used to believe all those corny ideals of the early internet of cooperation but that old commie stuff is so 80s! Fuck cooperating I got to get paid! It's the libertarian way!

Also I'm thinking of starting a waste management company and just dump all the trash in the river. After all if I want to destroy the environment for a quick buck you can't stop me, it would go against your libertarian ideal!

Now all we have to do is get rid of the minimum wage and and any unnatural trade barriers. I hire only indians at my consulting firm. Why? Because they are the cheapest! You can't sue me for discrimination because anti-racism laws are a state solution! HAHA!

Being a libertarian rocks! ME ME ME ME ! YA! Greedy Anti-Social Nerds for Libertarianism! Woohoo!

Re:Eric Raymond too

[ciaran_o_riordan]

ESR is a jackass.

Sun have some interesting technology in Java and the StarOffice additions to OpenOffice.org. They have made real efforts to interact with the Free Software community by releasing OpenOffice under the GPL/LGPL. We should be encouraging to release more Free Software, not telling them they're dead (when they're not).

Ciaran O'Riordan

I wrote them something too...

[EvilAlien]

... and it is pretty similar in theme, but much less polite. I don't believe I went as far as to refer to McNealy as an assclown, but I wanted to ;)

Here is the email I sent to Sun (Wednesday, October 01 2003) about this after getting one of their seminar spams:

Hello

Firstly, I'm not going to bother to spellcheck this before I hit send, so please forgive any spelling errors.

Before I sign off of this list, I thought I would register my frustration at something a significant representative of Sun Microsystems has done.

I'd rather not receive your emails given the patently stupid things Scott McNealy said in his SunNetwork keynote in San Francisco. It is painfully obvious now that Sun, along with Microsoft, is one of the puppetmasters behind the rediculousness coming out of the SCO Group lately. The claim that Solaris x86 is good for ANYTHING other than a learning tool for Solaris on sparc hardware is the stupidest thing I've heard since the last public statement from the desk of Darl McBride. If McNealy seriously thinks that Solaris x86 has a future as an operating environment of choice on x86 hardware, then he needs to be removed by the Sun Microsystems board ASAP. Otherwise, he will destroy your company.

I consider Solaris to be a superior UNIX variant to HP-UX and AIX, and it will be sad to watch it go down if McNealy continues to steer the company along its present course. However, I consider Solaris to be a vastly inferior UNIX-like operating system for cheap commodity hardware in the x86 and ia64 families. Linux, quite simply, offers much more than Solaris does, and Sun turning away from its committment to supporting Linux on x86 is nothing more than a poorly disguised strategy to damage Linux. If Linux is now seen as a competitor and if Sun, unlike IBM, refuses to leverage its value, then Sun will eventually wither away.

The kernel that Linux made will become the enterprise solution, and Sun will be a footnote.

As you can tell, I've been quite inspired by McNealy's keynote. Best of luck to the rest of you in his organization, you will need it.