[cobalt-users] Re: Alternative upgrade path for RaQs

[Bruce Timberlake <bruce@xxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

> Bruce, what do you think are the reasons for Sun abandoning the
> appliance market? I was hoping to see sun move the Cobalt platform
> onto Sun Linux, and provide us an upgrade path at the same time,
> but from what you are saying this isnt going to happen.

<unofficial speculation>

With the rapid decline of the hosting market in general, the largest 
market for the RaQs is quickly 'going away' -- the Verios and 
HostPros of the world aren't buying hundreds or thousands of servers 
a month anymore.

Most at Sun never got 'the vision' of what appliances could be or do. 
Sales tanked because there were few people to sell them anyway - hard 
to get the sales force motivated to sell a $1000 box when there was 
normally one or two more zeros on a box's price tag...

That same sales force is _not_ focused at all on the small/medium 
business market, which is where the Qube was squarely aimed.  Those 
customers were supposed to be the area for resellers to go after.  
But if there could be a group more Solaris-bigoted than Sun itself, 
it is the majority of Sun resellers who also were hard to motivate to 
sell $1000 boxes.

Imploding sales (due to general economic reasons plus confusion within 
Sun on how to market the products), combined with the fact that Linux 
is only recently 'A Good Thing' at Sun, all added up to disaster 
themselves.  Then you put in the tanking economy and layoffs, mix in 
Sun's industry-famous "perpetual internal reorganizations," and 
enough confusion and chaos resulted that resources weren't allocated 
to keep existing products afloat, let alone put new ideas on the 
roadmap.  Sun has basically decided to shoehorn Linux into the area 
that they 'know' - general purpose servers and workstations.

Scott McNealy was very intrigued by the Qube (rumors of his personal 
demos of the Qube to other 'brand name' CEOs were legendary). At the 
lowest levels, the SEs and a few in the sales force _did_ grasp 'The 
Vision' and truly believe... but that immense "blob" of people 
between Scott and the SEs was too confused about the product and too 
bewildered by the collapsing economy/market to dedicate any resources 
or give it a chance at all.

<unofficial speculation />

- -- 
Bruce Timberlake

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+HapKvLA2hUZ9kgwRAgxSAKCB2RqQ5qSwgxFvd5WU2yA8C7x4YgCfQr5K
aWUBl93pUtaC5efx7MfJ/K0=
=e4b+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----