|
Scott McNealy Dear Mr. McNealy,
On Tuesday January 8th, Solaris users were astonished to learn from articles in the on-line trade press that Sun has ceased plans to deliver the Solaris 9 operating system for the x86 architecture alongside its upcoming release for the SPARC platform. The announcement by Graham Lovell, director of product marketing for Solaris, can only be perceived as a broken promise and a betrayal to both your many long-time, loyal customers and the millions of new users, developers, and system administrators which have been introduced to Sun solutions since the Solaris 8 free download program. We write you today to ask you to reconsider this decision.
Mr. Lovell is quoted as justifying the withdrawal from previous commitments because, "we need to focus on immediate revenue where possible." As many of us are Sun stock holders, we appreciate the company's efforts to be fiscally responsible. While the Solaris free download succeeded in putting Solaris in the hands of over a million people, perhaps it is indeed too costly to continue the give-away in these difficult economic times. However, we cannot understand why Sun did not simply return to previous Solaris pricing models for the version 9 release. We believe that many individuals and organizations who downloaded Solaris 8 over the last year for free would be willing to purchase the next release if the price was in line with other commercial operating systems. As far as we can tell, no effort was taken by Sun to gauge whether this solution would be acceptable to the user community and we are concerned that a potential revenue stream may be ignored.
Several of the articles and subsequent comments in on-line discussion groups point to Sun's dropping of Solaris x86 as a strategic decision to protect its own SPARC architecture. Again, as many of us are stockholders, we recognize that Sun must never lose sight of its core hardware business. We believe that the 32bit x86 architecture can never be a true competitor to Sun's 64 bit SPARC. In fact, Solaris on the x86 platform complements Sun's SPARC solutions. It is many of our experiences that Solaris x86 is installed on existing systems running the competitions' operating systems and closed applications. Once we transition these systems to Solaris and open solutions, Sun quickly proves to have the superior technology. Our customers are subsequently much more receptive to Sun hardware solutions as they outgrow their x86 systems. As developers and system administrators we value the ability to run the same operating system across the enterprise: laptop, desktop, workstation, workgroup server, and large-scale server. We revel in our ability to demo our enterprise applications to potential customers on off-the-shelf notebook computers. Finally, we believe that the widespread adoption of Solaris on the x86 platform has and would continue to increase the creation of hardware drivers and applications for both x86 and SPARC systems.
For your long-time customers (hardware and software), it is disconcerting that Sun would discontinue any product without following its traditional procedure of giving at least one version notice in an official end-of-life notice. After being reassured by Sun as late as this fall that there would indeed be a Solaris 9 for x86 and after the widely publicized Solaris 9 beta for SPARC and x86, many of us can only feel betrayed by this recent announcement, after having made critical business decisions based on Solaris x86. For your loyal customers and vocal advocates, it is especially hurtful that this decision was not voiced directly to us through the various on-line user forums dedicated to this platform.
On extremely short notice, we are forced to reevaluate our future development plans to react to these moves by Sun. It is clear that we must seek alternatives now. For those already committed to the x86 architecture in the short term, those alternate solutions will not have the SPARC upgrade path which Solaris x86 provides. Still, a clear statement by Sun on the future of Solaris x86 and the value it brings to Sun would repair much of the damage and restore the confidence of your customers. We look forward to your personal attention to this matter.
Thank you. |