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Judith L. Estrin Chief Executive Officer Packet Design, Inc. 2465 Latham Mountain View, CA 94040
Dear Ms. Estrin,
Thank you for reading our letter of March 21, 2002 to Sun's board of directors and forwarding it to management. In late May, we received a reply from Patricia Sueltz, then Executive Vice President of Software. While we appreciated her lengthy response, it neglects the real needs of customers and fails to highlight Sun's greatest strengths. Since her letter, Sun has made great progress. We would like to take this opportunity to provide you with a status report of Sun management's efforts to resolve our complaints.
At LinuxWorld, July 2002, Sun committed to supporting Solaris x86, but only on its new LX50 server. The Solaris x86 customer community was immensely disappointed by the initial statements limiting future releases of Solaris x86 to this system, and Sun's failure to address our core complaints. Yet we also recognized that the Sun LX50, bundled with Solaris, represented a significant change of mindset among top management. Sun, from top to bottom, appreciates that Solaris x86 is valuable intellectual property. The LX50 is, by itself, important as it is the outgrowth of the Cobalt Networks purchase and proof that management is listening to its customers, who are asking for low-cost, general purpose, 32-bit solutions. We cannot overstate the significance of providing a hardware product for Sun's systems-focused sales force. Should the LX50 prove to be profitable for Sun, we hope it will pave the way for additional Sun x86 based solutions. We were pleased to learn on February 10th that Sun's new SunFire Blade server will support x86 as well as SPARC based Blades and we expect full Solaris x86 support.
On February 6th, Sun officially resurrected Solaris x86 as a stand-alone product. In a very strong press release, management makes clear that it believes that Solaris x86 is a valuable asset to the company. We are immensely pleased by press reports that Sun is offering increased incentives for software sales. This should encourage greater exposure of Solaris x86 and other SunOne components. We expect all SunOne products to be made available for the Solaris x86 platform - as previously promised. We are eager to assist Sun with increasing the numbers of independent hardware and software vendors, but management must do its fair share by making certain that its own SPARC centric hardware and software product lines are available for Solaris x86. We are overjoyed that Sun is committed to taking full advantage of the Solaris x86 product as a Microsoft Windows transition tool. We are eager to advise Sun on how to most effectively communicate to our colleagues in the IT trenches, as well as the next generation in academia. We look forward to an improved marketing campaign.
The release of Solaris 9 x86 goes a long way towards repairing the relationship between Sun and its customers, but there is much more work to be done. On February 21st, our community's representatives will be meeting with Jonathan Schwartz to achieve a full partnership with the customer community and to ensure Sun's continued success. We hope that Sun management will capitalize on the lessons learned from its experiences with the Java, OpenOffice, and Mozilla community projects. We expect our customer concerns will be addressed and our suggestions seriously considered.
We ask that you continue to follow the Solaris x86 and related issues in your advisory position as a Sun board member. Sun's senior management is on the right path to reforming the company so that it is responsive to customer concerns. Should Sun falter, or diverge from this path, we will be the first to let you and all stock holders know. We hope that you will share with the rest of the board our optimism that Sun Microsystems' future is a bright one.
Thank you.
www.save-solaris-x86.org |