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August 24, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Sun baits HP with wooden cutout
Note from the writer, Sept. 7: In this article, I incorrectly reported the material from which the cutout is made. It's wood. I regret any confusion I may have caused.
Sun has its fair share of cutups. Now they've been joined by a cutout.
In a stunt that appears to be part PR, part prank, and part pestering, Sun has secured a wooden cutout of HP founders William Hewlett and David Packard for $6,000, boasts Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz in his blog. Since acquiring the life-size portrait, Sun has set up various photo-ops with it, bedecking the duo in pro-Sun and Solaris paraphernalia.
Therein lies the prank and the pestering of the stunt. The PR emerges in Schwartz's touting of Solaris in his post. "With nearly 25% of Solaris downloads requested on to HP's servers, we know their customers really want the partnership, and we're happy to oblige," he writes.
"To warn you in advance, Bill and Dave have both indicated a strong interest in learning more about Sun and the Solaris platform, so stay tuned," he continues.
The wooden dual portrait, by the way, was part of a cross-country art project called "Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight."
HP was given right of first refusal to purchase the portrait of its esteemed founders, but the company declined. In his own blog, HP Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence Eric Kintz returns Schwartz's volley, seemingly unimpressed by, or perhaps even sour on, Sun's "nice stunt." "I never met Bill or Dave, but I bet neither of them would have approved paying thousands for representations of themselves," he writes.
Kintz also made a point of addressing Schwartz's claims about the popularity of Solaris on HP servers by pointing to an HP-written summation of a 2006 IDC report. As far as I can tell, nothing there contradicts Schwartz's assertions of Solaris being downloaded to 25 percent of all HP servers. The report does say that "HP is #1 in high-end Unix server revenue with a 48.3% market share worldwide. IBM is #2 with 20.7% and Sun is #3 with 14.0%."
As for the fate of Hewlett and Packard: Sun says it will donate the piece to the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.
Posted by Ted Samson on August 24, 2006 03:30 PM
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Why all the brouhaha over the steadily shrinking Unix market? Wouldn't both companies be better off paying attention to their Linux strategies instead of spending so much time in poo-flinging over who's going to be the last Unix standing?
Posted by: Don Marti at August 24, 2006 07:51 PMhi don,
Sun is trying to tell the world that Solaris is as good or better than Linux now that it is open source and can run on more than 1 platform(x86 and sparc).
The world will be a boring place if only 1 OS were to rule. There is place for OS X, Solaris, Windows and Linux in this world (also *BSD, etc).
BR,
~A
25% percent of Solaris downloads requested on to HP's servers speaks more of the prolific nature of HP's hardware, than it does anything else.
It's also far more realistic to believe that 25% of Solaris downloads go to HP servers than that 25% of HP servers are loaded with Solaris: " ... As far as I can tell, nothing there contradicts Schwartz's assertions of Solaris being downloaded to 25 percent of all HP servers. ..."
This might be constriued as usurping art for the sake of corporate marketing. I strongly suspect other executives will now think twice about being a part of an art project that they do not plan on purchasing, for fear of the artwork they were a part of being used to damage their company. Cute & funny, yes; socially responsible, questionable.
Posted by: Ross at August 27, 2006 10:27 PMOkay,
I downloaded Solaris 10 to my Dell laptop to cut CDs to install on my IBM x305 for evaluation purposes. What does that prove?
Who did this HP-UX research? Did they compare the specs of the HP machines with the Sun Athlon machines at any moment. This is like buying a Fiat 500, then decide that it does not run as fast as expected, and to fix that change the steering wheel and windshield wipers.
The only thing this proves is that HP-UX sales reps are better than the ones from Sun. The performance HP hardware is certainly not the decive factor.
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