If you don’t make it a habit to hit the Sun.com front page frequently, have a look. I’ve notice some incremental change over the last couple days and tonight its gotten a major facelift. It now pushes offers in your face more prominently (downloads and try-n-buys), integrates a lot more video (most is rehashed stuff that you may or may not have seen), and most interesting breaks down business sectors.
One interesting thing is banners like Transform Your Email with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. This suggests a major shift in marketing focus; rather than push potential Java Enterprise solution stacks, just giving in to the fact that the business world is standardized on Exchange and sell sell sell.
I’m not suggesting that Sun hasn’t appealed to the Microsoft base in the past, we’ve gradually see Microsoft logo’s slip onto more and more presentation slide decks, but this feels like Sun’s finally put its arms around the beast in light of these tough economic times.
Frankly, I’d go even further to suggest that this is just the first step toward Sun really shifting into rescue mode. While I currently have no visibility into whats happening in the halls of Sun, the external vibe I’m getting is that there is extreme pressure on the executives to turn this thing around… or else. That might be a “duh” statement, but most of us will agree that Sun’s been in a tough position for a while now… something has changed drastically, something very recent, and I’m not sure its the economic downturn/crash, so much as its putting pressure on an already disastrous situation.
I could speculate further, but for now lets just watch and wait.
I think Apple should buy Sun. Apple’s server offerings are slim and old, and the team could do a great job competing with IBM and HP.
Sun has been a stubborn company for years, basically ignoring all but its biggest customers, especially as far as pricing is concerned. If you weren’t a big company, you’d be getting skinned alive paying outrageous sticker prices, all the while biggest customers did “bulk orders” and would be paying 30% of the same sticker price.
No wonder customers called foul. And now it’s all paying itself back, with interest.
The Sun Site looks terrible on my Open Solaris 100a w/Firefox 3.01. The menus and logos are washed out and can not be easily read.
>> If you weren’t a big company, you’d be getting skinned alive paying outrageous sticker prices, all the while biggest customers did “bulk orders” and would be paying 30% of the same sticker price.
Sadly, that’s also been Oracle’s strategy. Oh, they may give you the appearance of a generous discount percentage, but does it matter with their “CPU Core = 50+% of a processor” costing @ $47k/processor retail? $25k/processor for Weblogic?
Price out plain jane Weblogic app server on a 5140. The license cost is ten times the hardware cost. That’s just wrong, even with a ginormous discount.
By the way, Ben, you really should do a blog post on the now open-warfare between Sun and Oracle. The two used to be thick as thieves and now it’s apparent that not only is the honeymoon over – they’ve filed for legal separation.
The menus each take at least 2 seconds to appear. Very underwhelming.
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