HP Baited With Cutouts of Founders

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.

Comments

Re:Stupid CEO Tricks

[Greyfox]

Sun doesn't really seem to be about making stuff for customers. Their focus seems to be more on just making stuff their engineers consider to be cool. This stunt seems just like something Sun would do -- someone in the company thought it would be cool but just like everything else about Sun it lacks focus and direction. Maybe they should focus less on childish pranks and more on, oh, I dunno... fixing thise decade-old problems in Java that keep it from being a reasonably good system programming language.