From: scott@asd.com (Scott Barman)
Subject: Re: Is Sun losing touch with its customers?
Organization: American Software Development Corp., West Babylon, NY
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 02:38:17 GMT

In article <1992Dec27.200016.6479@ukw.uucp> lupe@ukw.uucp (Lupe Christoph) writes:
>When Sun announced they would "join the crowd" this was generally
>hailed as a good decision. But this was when nobody had the next
>release around the corner, and nobody was forced to face the consequences.
>
>Where were you BSD advocates at the time this decision was made? Nobody
>spoke up for BSD at the time!

When Sun announce they would "join the crowd" almost five years ago,
there was no "crowd." At that time Sun also told us that we should not
worry, they will provide an upgrade path and that their valued customers
would be taken care of.  I recently found an old UnixWorld (I think)
magazine where Scott McNeely made this type of statement (I'll try to
find it--it's piled with the issue where Bill Gates calls Xenix the next
generation of pee cee operating systems).

What went wrong?  First of all, they are two years late.  They were
supposed to have a System V OS out by 1990.  Well, life goes on.  Those
in business have to continue doing work so that money can be made and a
significant investment in 4.1.* software was made.  Which is also
strange.  If Sun wanted everyone to move to System V, then why come out
with more BSD-based systems?  What kind of message does that send to
their customers.

Secondly, as they keep releasing BSD-based systems, their only migration
was to give their user a hierarchy of System V differing items (see the
/usr/5{bin,include,lib} directories) and making it OPTIONAL to load it
(see every installation through 4.1.3).  Making it optional and not
really advertizing its benifits removes the emphesis on its importance
in the transition between SunOS and Solaris.  Yes, there are mentions of
this in the manuals, but the mentions seem as insignificant as many of
us interpereted them.  We only learn of their importance when Sun came
out with the System V Migration Tool (svmt).

Then Sun announced they are almost ready and puts out the svmt. When it
is finally loaded, you realize that svmt is nothing more than a
glorified lint!  What's worse is that those of us who have used X
Windows since the dawn of time (OK, so it has only been since X Version
10) have decided to stay with MIT's X11 and away from Sun's perpertually
buggy OpenWindows with their slow response in fixing the bugs (and MIT's
X11 was free, I remember having to pay for an initial OW release).  This
svmt runs under Sun's XView (SunView for X without intrinsics support)
and you had to figure out how to run it to a tty to get around their
near useless GUI.  Some tool!

I mentioned OpenWindows above.  In the middle of all this, Sun decides
that since almost nobody (except SGI) embraced NeWS, they were going to
join the world and give their customers X.  Their initial offerings of
OpenWindows tried to make everyone happy, including their SunView users.
Instead of trying to move on (which OW3 seems to have done it close to
right), they have held on to their past alienating those who have chosen
X Windows as their standard (most of the industry).  Even today, Sun is
making "quiet" noises of dropping NeWS and moving twoards intrinsics-based 
interfaces.  [Personal opinion: ever notice how Sun follows the standard
for everything but when they start talking about GUIs, they call
themselves the first (true) but don't dive into what they are doing
today beyond saying "We're X11 compatible?  It's about time Sun joined
the rest of us!]

So they are later and getting later.  Still, there is this large
investment in 4.1.* with no good upgrade path and they keep pushing back
the release date (yes, I did get my Solaris 2.1 CDs last week).  In the
mean time, those of us on limited budgets have been producing software
with their distributed C Compiler.  After much infighting, Sun decides
to drop it from their system.  Why?  They claim it is no longer needed
and those who need it will buy it.  This is what they do in the pee cee
industry, right?  Well the cost of the hardware and software is
different.  They remove what many of us consider a vital part of their
distribution, raise the price of it, and tell us they did it because
Billy down the block does it.  Someone forgot to tell Scotty that if we
wanted to put up with Billy's antics, we would not have Suns on our
desks.

So you see, it wasn't perceived to be a problem at that time.  If Sun
stuck to their word and made this as painless as they "promised" we
would not be screeming.  But they dragged their feet and hit us with a
lot of interim stuff that is not on any real upgrade path.  Now they are
telling us to conform or (proverbially) to hell with you.  Many of use
can't stop and conform.  We need help and time.  Help Sun promised from
the beginning and time because they forgot that they told us not to
worry.

Personal Observation: It's interesting how the promise of NT says it
will run Windows 3 AND DOS applications but Solaris 2 will not run
statically linked 4.1.* a.outs and may not run other applications that
use unsupported features in their bsd-compatibility mode (e.g., light
weight processes).

-- 
scott barman			| <This space intentionally left blank>
scott@asd.com			|
 (I can barely speak for myself, you expect me to speak for my employer??)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.misc