[SunRescue] [OT] Sun TV commercials

[scohen - Stephen Cohen]

David Rouse writes:
>Sometimes the only meaningful information 
>is buried in technical papers.

This is not by accident.  It is actually by design.

Those who understand what is found in the technical papers are very
typically NOT those who make the purchasing decisions.  Sun isn't marketing
its wares to those who know - it is addressing a far, far larger audience.

There used to be a saying "No one has ever been fired for purchasing IBM
computers."  While this is no longer true, it underscores that, all too
often, the quality of a purchasing decision is made by unqualified
observers.

If, for example, a large financial institution had purchased something other
than IBM just a few years ago, its stock price may have suffered because
Wall Street may have seen a huge risk that the institution's data processing
would no longer be stable.

Sun (and other companies) is trying to leverage the perception (one which it
created several years ago) that it 'powers the internet'. The unstated
message being conveyed is that business can consider Sun to be a low-risk
purchase decision.

Here is another example of how certain brain-dead decisions are made.
Despite the fact that Apache has hordes of developers working all over the
world to incorporate the latest advances into this web service, my company
purchased Netscape Enterprise Server and runs it on WindowsNT!  The
executive making the decision to reject Apache (on Linux, DEC Alpha, Sun
SPARC & Sun on Intel) said that it is too risky to rely on something that
isn't supported.

One can lead horses to water . . .