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John Loiacono Senior Vice President Sun Microsystems, Inc. 901 San Antonio Road Palo Alto, CA 94303
Dear Mr. Loiacono,
Over the last four months, a significant group of Sun's customers has been trying to reach various members of management. We are attempting to communicate our concerns that Sun is moving in the wrong direction in regard to the announced indefinite delay of Solaris 9 x86 and the new Linux server offerings. We are deeply worried that Sun does not fully realize that it is endangering its long term relationship with its customers. I write you today regarding these fears and to ask for your help with one specific marketing issue in my particular industry, higher education.
As a stockholder, I have always been impressed with Sun's achievements in developing tremendous customer loyalty. In just twenty years, Sun has become a leading vendor because those of us in the I.T. trenches know that it deserves our absolute trust. As we wrote in the enclosed letter to Scott McNealy back in January, Sun has seemingly forsaken us and thrown aside its greatest asset, its relationship with the user community. The continuing delay in acknowledging and committing to redress our complaints only exacerbates the damage.
The Solaris x86 and Linux announcements have caused many of us to more closely examine Sun's business practices and long-term strategies. One area which Sun has been a leader but now seems to have lost focus is in its relationship with the higher education community. Sun should be commended for its deep discounts to .EDUs but its marketing efforts have been disappointing as of late when compared to its competitors. Microsoft in the last two years has finally learned the great lesson of Sun and Apple. <URL:http://www.msdnaa.edu/> By investing in its relationship with students, a company wins paying customers when those students leave their campuses and enter the real world.
Unfortunately, while Microsoft has been heavily marketing its Academic Alliance program, Sun has kept smart programs like SchoolZone hidden on its web-site and limited to the U.S. education market. <URL:http://store.sun.com/docs/specials/workstations/schoolZone.jhtml> With SchoolZone, Sun seems to acknowledge what Solaris x86 users and the entire Sun user community have been trying to communicate to management in recent years: if it wishes to be a long-term competitor, Sun not only needs to put its technologies in professors' offices and in campus computer laboratories, but in student dorm rooms on their desktop PCs and in their backpacks on their laptops. If Sun was to distribute marketing material for this program to existing academic customers, specifically instructors and system administrators, they would see it handed out during lectures and posted on department bulletin boards.
I have enclosed a copy of an advertisement for Microsoft's student program. To my dismay, the program has been extremely popular on the Penn State campus. As a Sun advocate and someone who hires computer science students for internships, it is disturbing to see how much more comfortable these students are at using the inferior Microsoft development tools and operating environments than Sun's superior solutions. I fear that Sun has lost mind share among engineering and science students and next generation purchase makers.
I hope that I have adequately illustrated to you the great risk that Sun will permanently damage its relationship with its customers. I hope that I have demonstrated why Sun needs to improve its marketing to university students in both U.S. and in emerging markets. I hope that I have explained to you the benefit to Sun of providing its developer tools and its operating environment on the x86 platform which most student already own. I hope that you will forward these concerns to the appropriate managers.
Thank you.
John Groenveld www.save-solaris-x86.org |