From: fgreco@cfdev1026.shearson.com (Frank Greco)
Subject: Re: Why is Sun abandoning SunOS4.1.3?
Organization: Lehman Brothers
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 19:23:19 GMT

In article <1992Dec19.221627.20632@midway.uchicago.edu> epc1@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>Why is Sun losing touch with their customer base?  First, they

	They have the lion's share of the workstation market.  Who's
	losing touch with who's customer base?

>use and continue to use a ridiculous, ugly windowing manager (olwm) despite

	Your opinion.  I think mwm is ridiculous and fugly myself, but
	thats mho of course.

>the fact that a majority of their users use mwm.  OpenWindows is fine
>but I want Sun to provide mwm.  Yes, I hate paying $250 for a license
>for every Sun we buy.  

	Yeah and I hate paying $1500 to drop a Chevy engine whenever I
	buy a Ford.  Why doesn't Ford just put Chevy engines into their
	cars?  How stupid can they be?  And I hate when I have to
	change the channel to watch ESPN, why doesn't ESPN move to
	CBS?  I hate having to use my PC when EXCEL doesn't run on my
	SPARC, why doesn't Microsoft just port their stuff to SPARC
	and forget about NT?

	I hate dealing with adversity, why doesn't the world just
	change to the way that *I* like?

>Now, Sun is abandoning SunOS!!!  The question IS NOT why don't vendors

	Who sez?  Solaris 2.X contains SunOS 5.0.

>port their apps but WHY can't I run my old apps on new, faster hardware?

	Why can't you?  As long as you're dynamically linked, your 
	old apps will run.  Sometimes to get further advances in software,
	you take a hit.  Just like when we moved from Sunview to X,
	all our apps *initially* took a substantial hit due to the
	networking nature of X Window.  But we re-architected our
	apps to take advantage of distributed computing so in the end
	they run faster.

	One of my clients had a CPU-bound process that took over 2 days to
	run.  They could've bought a multi-million-dollar Cray to run this 
	old app on faster hardware.  But I re-architected this process
	into many pieces to run distributed (RPC) over their LAN on
	existing workstations.  It now runs in 2 hours using a series
	of SS2's.

>Sun is supposed to be custoemer responsive and built its successes on 
>meeting user's needs where traditional, large computer makers used
>proprietary software and OS's.  Now, they're telling everyone to
>abandon their old knowledge and apps for a new OS.  What does Solaris 

	Gees where have you been for the last few years.  They have
	been telling the Sun community for quite a loooong time this
	change was coming.

>incorporate that they could not put into SunOS???  Buying old hardware

	A unified Unix.  Something that the Unix market never, never
	had and something that the Unix market needs badly to compete
	with $BILL Gates.  This splintering causes confusion and tells
	customers to be wary of Unix (one of the prime reasons why OSF was
	founed imho).

>to support an old OS is not an option in my opinion.  They should not
>have caused such confusion in the first place.  

	What confusion?  Portability and new hardware are issues that
	every system manager handles on a day-to-day basis.  This
	is no different.

>If this is the direction that Sun is taking, then they will definitely 
>alienate people who bought their machines.  Sun is no better and no
>worse than other vendors who say, "do what we tell you to do when we
>tell you to do it.  if you don't listen to us, we won't supprt your old
>os forever and you won't be able to run our newest and fastest machines"

	Oh puhleeze.  
	
	1.)  Lest you forget, pick up the Wall Street Journal and look
	under the NASDAQ listings.  Surprise!  Sun is a public company
	in the company of Microsoft and Intel and Novell and Lotus
	and...  They are not a FSF or a philantropic organization; they
	are a business.  They have to satisfy their stockholders as 
	well as their customers.

	2.) Microsoft does this (does your DOS 1.0 FCB pgms run in a FAT 5.0
	environment?).  IBM has been doing this for years on their mainframes.
	HP gives you several OS's, all incompatible with each other.  Will
	your VAX/VMS apps run without porting (or re-compiling) on an Alpha
	running (ha!) OpenVMS?  I wonder if my future HDTV set will improve
	the b&w HoneyMooners reruns?  Wonder why your CD player cannot
	play your old LP's?  
	
	It's called progress.

>This is the straw which will cause me to stop being Suns and start
>purchasing new machines which seem more customer-oriented.  I 

	I suggest trying "License MS Windows from Us or Else" Microsoft.

>have been really impressed with the way DEC is remanaging their
>business and producing fast machines (i.e. Alpha).  I hate the

	If you're impressed with DEC, I have some land in Florida that
	you might be interested in.

>fact that our group works on VAXs, MIPs machines, and SUNs.  However,
>with this ultimatum by Sun, I will not continue to purchase their
>machines.

	That's what a free market allows you to do.  Have fun.

	Frank G.   :)
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