Experiences with SUN

[Doug Swartz]

From: Doug Swartz

I am the President of Integrated Solutions, a company that competes
directly with Sun Microsystems in the 4.2 BSD workstation business and
am thus clearly NOT an unbiased observer. I noticed your net mail with
great interest. I am not sending this mail out as sour grapes nor as
an effort to sell you anything, so I am not going to tell you at all
about our product. Further, before I begin I do not mean this mail to
imply that our products are perfect nor that we have only completely happy
customers.

I liken what has happened with Sun Microsystems to be very much like
the case of Emperors clothes. They seem to have a very effective
mechanism (which I admire by the way) for suppressing all negative
information about themselves and their products. By talking to the
people I know that work at Sun, I have found that they have had two
layoffs, had or have ( I get two different stories) acknowledged mix
and match problems between their CPU and memory boards, ie, memory
boards have to be hand selected to work with CPU cards, had problems
some time ago with defective memory chips and have the same quality
control problems that all fast growing American companies seem to
have. And yet not of these things ever appear in the press even though
Sun appears to make the front page of Computer Systems News at least
every other issue. It seems that everyone, including the press, feels
that everyone else feels that Sun is such a great company that no one
dares to criticize it.

At first I felt guilty about writing this mail because I feel that it
kind of a perversion of what is supposed to be a network for
distributing technical information to bad mouth a competitor. However,
I remember numerous articles extolling the virtues of the Sun product
written both by current and former Sun employees and I didn't feel
guilty any more. I am glad that you had the courage to say "Hey that
guy's at least a little bit naked".

On your question about the SMD cables, it is actually technically a
violation of the SMD specification to have any connectors in the link
between the SMD controller and the drive and can lead to higher than
normal soft error rates although the SMD specification is so conservative
that I doubt you will ever see this problem unless your cables are
extremely long.