Sun's Bold New Ad Campaign

Celeritas writes "Sun is making some noise over their latest x64server entries by doing a fly by over Dell's HQ yesterday. A few pictures were snapped to capture the event. Sun has continued the offensive by running some interesting ads as well as designing some that were rejected due to the controversial content or as Sun calls them 'bold ad concepts'"

Comments

Looks like some great ads

[Anonymous Coward]

... for Dell Computer Corporation, anyway.

McNealy is sure paying a lot of money to keep Michael's name in the big lights.

Re:Looks like some great ads

[dcocos]

The point that you are missing is that ( and this is a rule of marketing) is that the market leader never mentions the any competitors, but the rest of the companies ALWAYS mention the number one company so that potential consumers will equate their product with the market leader. Think about how often Pepsi mentions Coke in their ads but Coke NEVER mentions Pepsi. This is literally taken my from Marketing 101 class that I took oh so many years ago.

Reminds me of QuarkExpress

[ReformedExCon]

Didn't Quark run a bunch of ads that maligned Adobe's product and basically made Quark come off like a bunch of insecure jerks?

When you have to insult your competition, you insinuate that you are losing to them. Sun looks like they are losing to Dell, which they may very well be, I don't know. But this ad campaign cements that idea.

Re:Reminds me of QuarkExpress

[cybersaga]

When you have to insult your competition, you insinuate that you are losing to them.

Exactly. When you have to spend a lot of time trying to convince people why you're better than someone else, you need to start asking yourself why it's not obvious.

Re:Reminds me of QuarkExpress

[$RANDOMLUSER]

OK, let me think about this. A Dell Xeon comodity PC, labeled "server", running Linux, or a real 64-bit server blade running Solaris for roughly the same money. Hmmm, which one goes in my data center? I know! How about the company who knows what a data center is!

Re:Reminds me of QuarkExpress

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder what that says about Linux fanboys bashing M$ ...?

Re:Reminds me of QuarkExpress

[dougmc]

Yes, but if I'm interested in high-performance computing, I'd go with the Dell. I wouldn't touch Sun with a barge-pole performance wise; they're strictly for those who need high availability.

Odd. In my experience, if you need `high performance computing', you've outgrown x86 entirely and so have to ditch Dell and instead get Suns (or IBMs or HPs.) And high availability is thrown in for free ...

Yes, high end PCs are fast as hell now, and they're competing directly with Suns and IBM's fastest processors, and in the case of raw cpu speed, sometimes they even win. However, PCs have never been able to compete with the I/O bandwidth of the best servers out there, and they still can't.

(Though I don't know how the new Sun x86_64 boxes do. I suspect they compete nicely with other x86_64 boxes, but that the big Sun machines still beat them, especially in I/O. But when it comes to performance for a given price, it's been hard to beat a good PC for quite some time now, and I don't see this changing any time soon.)

As for high availability, you can have that with x86, x86_64, Sparc, RS6K, PPC, whatever. The good server boxes have basically caught up with what the servers have had for a long time -- redundant power supplies, RAID, etc. And of course you can't really have a high availability environment with a single computer anyways ...

Idiots

[elronxenu]

Perhaps Sun could learn to promote their products on their own merits, rather than insulting a competitor.

Re:Idiots

[nametaken]

But then it wouldn't have made digg.com, /., and thousands of other major sites.

Whats the point of a mature ad campaign that nobody notices. An obnoxious one is almost always better. Just ask AFLAK.

So that's my take. Can you hear me now?

Re:Idiots

[ScuxxletButt]

Gimme a break... this is schoolyard recess crap. Most of us outgrew this in fourth grade.

You are talking about a country full of consumers that made Pet Rocks a top selling item for Christmas several years in a row. This kind of advertising does work. It's sad, but it's true.

Re:Idiots

[popeyethesailor]

They are the leech of the industry, and with our patronage, future R&D is in grave trouble, because they give nothing back to the community.

Sorry, but this statement is total bullshit. Nothing back to the community ? Giving the customer a much better price-performance than everybody else means nothing?

I agree with most of your comment, Sun's boxes are usually better engineered. However, innovation does not always have to be in the technical domain; there's as much innovation happening in other fields, including marketing. Would you say Amazon.com has done nothing interesting because they did not invent any of their products? If Dell's products are so poor, why does Sun feel the need to compare themselves with Dell?

From an advertising copywriter...

[switcha]

I know it doesn't give me any authority, as consumers are the real gauge of how effective an ad is, but holy crap, those are awful ads. First off, they do almost as much pitching for the competition as they do Sun. Second, .. well, they just plain suck. Word play and throwing in a useless mild swear word isn't a hallmark of "bold", just an unimaginative mind.

I'm gonna go wash the taste of those out of my mouth now...

Re:From an advertising copywriter...

[Lehk228]

the ad doesn't suck... we are all sitting around slashdot talking about servers almost none of us were previously interested in but here we are talking about them, and looking up system specs on them. This ad will work quite well to stir up a buzz about Sun's servers.

Re:Cute, but is it really necessary? Exactly

[Jeff DeMaagd]

If marketing didn't matter, then DEC would probably still be around as DEC. They were very good with engineering, but bad at marketing and mad at management too.

The last time Sun pulled a stunt like this

[stox]

was when they announced the Ultra's. Once again, Sun made a remarkable turn around, and climbed to heights previously unseen. It was the third time Sun had returned from near death. Maybe this will be the forth. Sun has consistently built some of the best platforms out there, time to shed another skin and do it again.

Do some research, over time Sun has done more for Open Source than any other company.

Re:wtf?

[TheRaven64]

Dell is crippled by sticking with Intel. Intel went for the laptop market, while AMD went for the server market. The laptop market is bigger, and the margins are better in the server market, so this was a good choice for both companies. The problem is that Dell is trying to sell servers with CPUs that really aren't intended for server-class applications, or with older server class chips, while Sun is selling servers containing chips designed for servers.

Re:Wow. The clue meter is reading zero.

[sammy baby]

Oh, by the way ... all of Sun's x86 servers are certified to run Linux. They wouldn't bother if they thought that Linux sucks.

Au contraire. The reason they advertise Linux compatibility with their servers is precisely the same reason they advertise Windows compatibility: it's what their customers want to run. If they could, I'm sure they'd wave a magic wand and make their clients all hot and bothered to run Solaris.

Most likely the reason you don't hear them outright trashing Linux these days is that someone who works marketing for their hardware finally got through to the upper management: "Your customers are running Linux. They like Linux. Trash talk Linux, and they get defensive about their choices. Then they don't like you no more."