Unlike a lot of my fellow geeks, I don't have a lot of affection for Sun. I've nothing against them, it's just a case of so what? They've traded a long time on the affection that the geek in the street has for them going back to the days of SunOS (now there was a proper Unix, I do remember patching SunOS kernels to handle PPP right in the early days of getting an Internet connection at work!); after that there were the early days of Solaris 2, which weren't especially pretty and Linux came along and stole a lot of 'geek love'.
Ever since then, I think Sun have struggled a bit to find an identity. Open-source really hurt them financially but philosophically also; Java was great, is great even but they worked really hard to damage their reputation there. The fiasco around trying to turn Java into a standards-based language I'm sure will all come out at some point.
And then in 2005, they did the bizarrest thing they could; looking round at other companies making hay and realising they couldn't do storage themselves; they went and bought Storagetek! Of all the rash things to do! Were they mad? I think they even failed to jump the shark but decided to go swimming with it instead.
Then once they'd bought it, they managed to destroy what was good about Storagetek. They'd turn up to long-term Storagetek users and tried to sell them Sun, these were hard-bitten mainframe managers. And whilst they were trying to sell Sun, they took their eyes off the ball. Call-handling for tape library problems would disappear into the ether; problems with the integration of the back-end systems was the excuse. Engineers and techies started leaving, quality started to fall. Customer Engineering started to get backed out to partners and then things got really bad.
And long term Storagetek customers started to look elsewhere.
And now Sun launch Open Storage and there's not a Storagetek brand in sight.
There will be all kinds of theories put forward as to why Sun are failing; in storage, their service sucks in my experience. And that is why given the choice, I will try and avoid buying any Sun-related storage product.
Service is still king, give me great service and I will support you. Let your service quality fall and I'll be thinking about looking elsewhere. Sometimes I may find there is no where else to go and I'll stick with you, festering resentment and all but eventually an alternative will come a long, I'll be actively looking for it.
But then again storage rescued that other cool brand….Apple. So who knows ,perhaps it'll do the same for Sun?
“McNealy, who once famously compared the 2002 mega-merger of HP and Compaq Computer to the collision of two garbage trucks, said the combination of Sun and StorageTek was a good fit.”
Guess he should have been more wary of pointing that finger at his own company.