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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.
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".
Reading comprehension fail it... Slashdot's editors are unpaid volunteers, right?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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.
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
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...'"
...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 ;)
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
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.
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.
I should buy some cement.
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!"
Nah, couldn't be. No ponies.
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.
At least they're wasting far too much money on their marketing department, and not their legal one.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
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.
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.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
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.
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.
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?
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:
- Heat.
- 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.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
:-P
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.
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.