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

[$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

[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: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.