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

...wtf?

[Lehk228]

please tell me this is a very late april fools story

Re:...wtf?

[FuturePastNow]

No shit. The headline and summary completely misrepresent the article. It doesn't even make sense... Sun taunts HP with Sun's founders, Hewlett and Packard?

Re:...wtf?

[iced_773]

Nah, couldn't be. No ponies.

Re:...wtf?

[EvanED]

Of course it's not! It's a very early April fool's day story.

Sheesh... get it right next time.

I dunno, it just seems ...

[ScrewMaster]

sort of tacky to me.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[stupidfoo]

And why would you be proud of the fact that customers of a competing company is buying expensive HP hardware and then downloading your OS for free? They're basically saying "Ha! Look how foolish we are! Even HP can make money off of Solaris!"

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[The Mad Debugger]

There must be something about being CEO of Sun that makes you go BATSHIT INSANE. I mean, I was thinking that once McNealy stepped down the company might get a little less goofy, but I guess that's not the case. Oracle should just buy them, so we only have to deal with one nutjob egomaniac tech CEO.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[TheRaven64]

Sadly, both companies have lost that edge, and now produce mostly bland generic products, little different to any of the mass-market offerings.

I've seen a lot of comments like that in this comment, and I don't understand where they come from. Sun is still focussing in build quality, and making products that are a joy to use. The have one highly innovative CPU design in production, and two in development. They produce Opteron systems for the mass market, SPARC systems for HPC and T1 for the datacenter. Their UNIX variant is still under active development, and things like DTrace and ZFS are unparalleled.

HP, in contrast, had two of the best CPU designs on the market (PA-RISC and Alpha), and they let both die. They had two UNIXes, and they let both of them stagnate (although they are starting to undo this). They had an even more impressive OS in the form of OpenVMS, which ran on VAX and Alpha; they ported it to Itanium. If they'd ported it to x86 instead, then they could have sold huge numbers of systems. As it is, they've sold both of the Itanium machines sold.

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[spiderbitendeath]

Do they have frickin laser beams attached to their heads?

Re:I dunno, it just seems ...

[Erectile Dysfunction]

I agree. At some point it's best not to exploit the dead, and this is well beyond that point.

Grow up.

[Jethro]

Well I'm glad to know we're all still being immature and childish.

It's almost as if a News for Nerds website had derogatory icons for Microsoft and Bill Gates, or something.

Oh, wait.

(Seriously, Slahsdot, can we grow up a bit and just have non-insulting icons for these guys? It was funny in 1998, but come ON).

Disrespecting computing pioneers...

[Rotten168]

Wouldn't it be funny if Steve Jobs painted a Groucho Marx face on Pascal and Von Neumann's cardboard cutout likenesses? Oh wait, no it wouldn't. Sun just shows how utterly childish they are with this stunt.

For those who say "have a sense of humor" I will say "it's not even funny, really".

No Worky

[FuturePastNow]

Reading comprehension fail it... Slashdot's editors are unpaid volunteers, right?

The leading "Unix'

[netrangerrr]

With all of the free Linuxes around, and even being touted by IBM and others, dominating the traditional 'Unix' market is rapidly becoming like being the leader in Novel IPx networking.

Re:The leading "Unix'

[Anonymous Coward]

There must be some serious footnote action in that IDC report as well, because I don't see how HP-UX could be the leader unless they were counting "the Unix Market -- of servers in broom closets only in government facilities named after Mickey Mouse". If anything, from informal stats gleaned from looking at job listings over the past decade or so, I'd say the current state of affairs regarding demand for commercial unix is something like Solaris first (and far in the lead), followed by AIX, followed distantly by HP-UX. (Of course these days Linux outnumbers all of the commercial unixen put together.) I guess you might argue for spot statistics that perhaps there's just higher turnover in the Solaris admin space (e.g. if Sun was doing something irritating), but it's a trend I've noticed for quite a while and honestly one unix admin gig is about like any other (or at least, doesn't vary that much based on the OS used so I doubt that would be the rate determining factor on turnover).

a perfect rotating quote

[ChipMonk]

As I type this, the quote at the bottom of the Slashdot page is:

Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what value there may be in owning a piece thereof. -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

File this under "things that make you go 'hmmmmmmmmmm...'"

Cardboard cutouts of CowboyNeal !

[billstewart]

Sure, Bill, Dave, and the Sun Founders were all once very important here in the valley,
as were DEC, Compaq, Tandem, and everybody else absorbed by HP and Sun,
but they represent the 1970s and 1980s computer booms and the late-90s servers.

For this decade's cardboard cutouts, we need Web 2.0 figures, bloggers, and user-created-content wranglers, and I say who better than our own CowboyNeal!

I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grabass

[w33t]

...in the meantime our entire VMware infrastructure runs on Dell because they are actually busy making sales calls and setting up meetings with my VP ;)

Fuck Sun and HP.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck both Sun and HP. For those of us who have real systems to worry about, this sort of bullshit between marketeers and CEOs makes us cringe. Sun could have put that $6000 to good use. That would have been enough to pay an intern for the summer, perhaps one who could have gone through and fixed some of the fairly simple OpenSolaris bugs that are still open, even months after being reported.

Then again, these days it's rare to need the kind of hardware Sun or HP puts out. Several quality Opteron boxes from IBM running FreeBSD or Linux can provide the same level of service and the same reliability as a large Sun or HP system, and often at a far lower cost.

Wrong targets

[violet16]

Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.

Re:Wrong targets

[craXORjack]

Relax. It's just fun-spirited hijinks from those crazy guys over at Sun. It's like that time that Scott McNealy and Jonathon Schwartz snuck into the Microsoft headquarters and kidnapped Goatly, the Microsoft mascot, right before their big Windows ME launch. But then the goat ate a stack of Solaris installation diskettes in the closet where they hid it, and got so sick they thought it was going to die. So they had to return it before anyone found out but old Mr. Balmer caught them and made them promise never to do anything like that again. Those kooky kids!

Re:Wrong targets

[johnny cashed]

But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.

You're right, we shouldn't be making fun of HP and Sun.

Oh, wait, you were refering to Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. You're right, they shouldn't be making fun of them.

Re:Wrong targets

[LarsWestergren]

Nobody would blink if Sun took a cheap shot at HP. But making fun of two recently deceased Silicon Valley icons, both of whom are still deeply respected by many in the industry, is pretty poor form.

Did you read Schwartz's blog?

An artist has made cutouts of famous industrialists in a hitchhiking pose with and embedded GPS and placed them out to see if they reach their intended destination.

Schwartz: "Now, not everyone thought this was a cool idea. When presented with the opportunity to purchase the likeness of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, it having made the trek from the printer ink section of a San Jose Office Depot, our friends at HP elected not to honor their founders. So out of respect for HP's legacy, the fine folks in Sun's marketing team decided to acquire the artwork. Bill and Dave are absolute legends, held in the deepest respect by all of us at Sun. We were honored at the opportunity.

So we bought them, and their garage, for $6,000. Lock, stock and Java phone."

I think decking them out in an "I love Solaris" t-shirt before placing them was more intended as a gentle tease against HP rather than mocking the memory of the founders.

But who will think of the customers?

[Harmonious Botch]

These guys have lost their focus. I'm a business owner myself ( a bit smaller than Sun and HP, though ) and I would never encourage my employees to act or think like this. Beating your competition is the side effect that you derive from pleasing customers. It is not the goal.

Re:But who will think of the customers?

[Henry V .009]

Ayn Rand only said that because she was a kooky chick with her own cult. Many of the most creative people in history were motivated by the desire to beat others.

Re:But who will think of the customers?

[elrous0]

It got us to the moon, after all.

-Eric

Seems like something Sun would do

[virtuald]

I don't know if the story is real or not, but it seems like something Sun would do. Check out this here, its amusing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sandyk/archive/2006/02/24/53 8832.aspx

I especially like this one: "Sun Microsystems: Where Unix came to die."

In Sun's defense...

[Ant P.]

At least they're wasting far too much money on their marketing department, and not their legal one.

H & P's journey

[theobscurest]

I think the art (and technology) project behind this, "Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight", particularly Hewlett and Packard's travelogue is more interesting than the post. Ironic how HP wouldn't allow the cutout into their lobby!

Sun's Founders?

[Speare]

Wow, I never knew that Hewlett and Packard founded the Sun Microsystems company. The things you learn on Slashdot...

Stupid CEO Tricks

[Infonaut]

Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole. The company's stock is still trading at under $5/share. It faces tremendous competition from above and below, and it has been shedding employees like a duck sheds water. There are times when publicity stunts like this are a good idea. For example, when you're the young upstart and you want to poke fun at the established titans of industry.

Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky, and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department. Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years. Attempts to look like a saucy underdog just make the company look pathetic.

Make kick-ass products. Give customers what they want, and then some. Ready your history. Examine how IBM, Apple, and yes, HP recovered from their missteps. Earn respect. Don't endanger it by resorting to head-scratching 9th grade pep rally moves like this.

Re:Stupid CEO Tricks

[fm6]

Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky ...

Which pretty much describes everything Schwartz does.

...and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department.

What makes you think Schwartz even talked to his PR people? I'm sure if he had, they would have tried to talk him out of it.

Here's an irony: recently, Schwartz sent an email to all employees, boasting that Sun doesn't "waste money" on art with which to decorate its corridors. Instead, it puts up these tacky posters where Sun employees talk about how great a place the company is to work. Just to thing to convince employees that the company isn't circling the drain!

I give Scwartz a year, tops.

Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[reporter]

Someone should remind Jonathan Schwartz of a well-known truth: people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.

Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's.

The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development.

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[takeaslash]

n 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun. Sun engineers still work on low-end multi-core processors, but Fujitsu designs and builds all of Sun's high-end processors. The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's. The hardware division of Sun is now a shell of its former self. Sun management is seeking to close its Sunnyvale campus, which is the location of all of Sun's (former) processor development. You only have half the story. The highend Ultra V was killed off so that Sun could focus on their Rock CPU for the highend. They have also extended their partnership with Fujitsu to develop the APL line, and to rebadge each others products. The T1, Ultra IV+ processors with their current Opeteron line show that the hardware division of going along very well.

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[calidoscope]

In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers. According to an article by The Register, Sun now sells re-branded Fujitsu servers as Sun's high-end servers. Fujitsu is an OEM for Sun.

Devlopment on the UltraSPARC V was terminated - Sun is still working on the "Rock" prcessor - sort of a Niagara designed for large multiprocessor machines. Sun realized several years ago that processors were hitting a wall on single thread performance (compare performance gains between 1996 to 2001 vs 2001 to 2006) and emphasized multicore designs. Sun has also done some nice work with the Opteron - that combined with the Niagara are two reasons why Sun's market share has been increasing recently.

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[TheRaven64]

In 2004, the management at Sun Microsystems terminated any more development on high-end processors and high-end servers.

You are joking aren't you? Sun seem to be doing the only interesting CPU development at the moment. The T1 is an 8 core, 64-way SMT design specifically optimised for datacenter workloads. Its successor is going to have better floating point performance and even more parallelism. It gets the best performance per watt of any general purpose CPU for most web and database server workloads. The Rock, due out in 2008, aims for the the high-end market, and looks very promising.

I suppose the fact that they are not developing high-end servers anymore must be the reason why their market share in the server arena has increased for five quarters in a row.

The processors that battle IBM's Power5 are Fujitsu SPARC64's

The POWER5 (and, to a lesser degree, Itanium) are living in the very high-end HPC arena. This market keeps getting smaller. The T1 is in the web server and high-density datacenter market. This is an enormous growth area. At the moment, people buying large numbers of servers care about two things:

1. Heat.
2. Power usage.

The POWER5 is one of the worst offenders in this; it gets great performance (although not necessarily on the kind of workloads buyers are looking for), but it generates a huge amount of heat. Even IBM don't use it in their highest performance systems (Blue Gene and friends); they use PowerPC 405-series chips, which are much less powerful (they are mostly sold for use in mobile 'phones), but have a better performance / watt, and so they can be packed a lot more densely.

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[teflaime]

The POWER5 is one of the worst offenders in this; it gets great performance (although not necessarily on the kind of workloads buyers are looking for), but it generates a huge amount of heat.

Man, is this ever true. I got a 550 last year and put it down in my basement and hooked a fan up to it. Ran my website and heated my house to nice and toasty 72 degrees all winter.

Re:Throwing Stones from Glass Houses

[rayzat]

BlueGene runs on PPC440 cores not PPC405 cores. To the best of my knowledge 405 cores were never used in mobile phones. Most mobile phone software is designed to run on ARM processors and PPC and ARM code tend not to translate back and forth to each other very well. Never mind the fact that most of the mobile phone peripherils are designed to work with the AMBA bus and not the embedded PPC's(ePPC) PLB bus. Maybe you are referring to ePPC cores being used in chips for cell phone base stations.
IBM's older super computers were based on Power5 Technology, so IBM did use it in some of their most advanced computer systems.
While power and heat are very important chips like the Power5 are very important even though clusters of lower performance chips can get massive parallelization. Some application can be parallelized so your performance ultimatly becomes that of your fastest processing unit. So Power5 based systems work on entirely different problem sets then BlueGene.

Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab

[Informix]

Our local VMware SE recommends Sun hardware if customers actually want performance and support. He must be crazy; Dell is soooooo the market leader in technology innovation.

What is going on

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

If I wasn't so confused by the summary I'd probably think this was a really pathetic stunt by Sun. I'd also probably think it was really weird and sad that executives are fighting on their blogs.

Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab

[AJWM]

Dell is soooooo the market leader in technology innovation.

+1 Funny

Re:Who do I talk to...?

[jpardey]

A cardboard cutout of anything? I'd be happy to pay more than 400 for a cardboard cutout of anything.

Now, I just need to find a good any key.

Insightful my ass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun and HP both sell opteron boxes like IBM does. The only difference is Sun and HP both sell superiour hardware, at a lower cost. The IBM servers (both intel and amd) are flaky as fuck, and often require windows only patches to make stable, which helps not at all when you don't run windows. Fuck, HP even donates hardware to open source projects on occasion, and their ILO kicks serious ass. I will keep buying HP proliants to run free unixes on, you can get ripped off by broken shit from IBM.

Re:Well, this makes my life a little easier.

[stony3k]

I agree that this was a pretty stupid stunt, but I would expect that you would choose the best server, no matter what. And I'm sure Sun handles their support in a more "professional" manner. Frankly, I would compare this stunt to Steve Ballmer shouting "Developers" - it's that stupid.

$6,000 for some cardboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not even talking about "art" here, which would at least provide a spurious justification for such gross extravagance.

It's bad enough seeing scumbag trustfund kiddies flaunting their inherited wealth by doing nothing but ski or drive their Lamborghinis around all day, but paying $6,000 for a scrap of cardboard, just to play a prank?

The bloody revolution can't happen soon enough.

Re:$6,000 for some cardboard?

[Anpheus]

But the blood gets everywhere then and it's terribly hard to clean out of my whites, the bleach never really gets all of it...

Maybe we could have a not-so-bloody revolution? Just this once? You know, we can try it out, see if we like it. I mean, if we don't like it, we could always go for number two, right?

Re:$6,000 for some cardboard?

[sethstorm]

It's bad enough seeing scumbag trustfund kiddies flaunting their inherited wealth by doing nothing but ski or drive their Lamborghinis around all day, but paying $6,000 for a scrap of cardboard, just to play a prank?

Well, that sounds like you just described the average Stanfordite.

"Confusing headline"?

[rsidd]

You clearly and unambiguously referred to Hewlett and Packard as Sun's founders. The headline was not "confusing", it was WRONG.

And the summary is still WRONG. It says "a life-size cardboard cut of the HP rival's founders," and these people weren't founders of any HP rival (as far as I know), they were the founders of HP, which stands for (surprise) Hewlett-Packard.

Learn to, first, recognise your mistakes, second, admit them.

Re:You nailed it

[LarsWestergren]

but there are still big question marks, like what they actually intend to do with Java, and how they intend to operate in a world where Open Source is squeezing them in software,

They intend to open source it, they have even started working on it.

and commodity boxes are squeezing them in hardware.

They are one of the leading sellers of AMD64 boxes, plus they are still making some really cool hardware.

The HP Way

[niceone]

They could have done something better with those cutouts: Stuck a copies of "The HP Way" under their arms, painted tears on their cheeks and propped them up on Page Mill Road outside HP's HQ. Well that's what I would have done.

- an ex-HP employee

Re:I'm glad Sun and HP are having fun playing grab

[TheRaven64]

Dell are making sales? Last quarter, Sun server sales increased, while Dell, IBM and HP's all dropped.

They got $30 million of publicity for $6,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun just got their name in front of damn near everyone the tech community for $6000. That kind of publicity campaign would cost millions of dollars otherwise.

So, they did it by making fun of HP. BFD. Everyone makes fun of HP. HP's nothing more than a printer-ink-delivery company any more anyway, after Carly got through with them.

And if you have a problem that requires a few hundred gigs of RAM, that needs to be worked on by a hundred or so CPUs, and can't be partitioned so a cluster isn't a solution, you need one of those big SMP boxes from Sun, IBM, or HP.

And according to some HP engineers I know, almost no one buys the big iron from HP to run as an SMP box - they partition them into a bunch of 4-CPU domains and run Windows on them. :-P

Partial truth...

[Junta]

Disclaimer: I happen to be an IBM employee

True everyone sells similar stuff nowadays at the commodity level (putting aside HP's itanium, Sun's Ultrasparc, and IBM's power systems, which makes things more complicated), however my experience certainly shows IBM to be capable boxes without need of Windows for everything, with few exceptions. The e325/e326/e326m are out of place and may be subject to your criticism. I don't think of those servers as a sufficiently serious Opteron effort. The x336/x346/ and blades seem pretty good to me, and the IPMI 2.0 based rack mount systems allow SOL in a sane way. The wave of Opteron servers coming are a much more serious effort and work well in general compared to e32*.

My job is exclusively Linux, never ever booting Windows on any of our servers (though admittedly there exists hard drive firmware updates and a few other esoteric updates that are still DOS boot CDs or floppys, however the more common BIOS, BMC, and Diag updates have very good linux support without using DOS at all). In the past they did do goofy things with a powerquest image being written to a linux filesystem with PC-dos and booting into that, and the BMC updates used to require moderately aggravating IBM drivers, but that has been dropped in favor for updates that are self contained (BIOS, diag) or use OpenIPMI drivers (BMC).

All the systems nowadays have similar manageability, ILO is nothing special compared to Dell's, Sun's, and IBM's BMCs nowadays. Everyone sells IPMI compliant management and at least IBM I know implements it well and provides all features I could think of for remote management save for remote video console (but who needs that when you have linux/SOL) without additional cost. RSA cards are there for the people who need remote video console and a fancy web interface. I'd wager everyone's BMC implementation is on par and nowadays manageability is not as much a discriminating factor...

IBM I admit could donate more hardware to some open source efforts, but they do contribute a significant amount of developer work to open source projects, which helps offset the hardware issue some.

Anyway, in summary, IBM may have in the past been subject to that criticism in the x86 space, but in my job experience it has improved greatly.