President and COO of Sun Federal Bill Vass' Weblog

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Wednesday Oct 29, 2008

First Annual SunFed Duck Pin Bowling Extravaganza!

Last week about 160 SunFed, Force3 and AMD bowlers hit the lanes at White Oak Duck Pin Lanes, on New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring, Maryland. For those of you out there that have never tried Duck Pin Bowling...I know last week was my first time...I highly recommend it. The balls are about the size of a cantaloupe and there are no finger holes. The pins are also smaller than regular bowling pins, and sometimes very unpredictable when struck dead on. I played with Anthony Robbins, Ken Rollin and Russ Craig. I won't tell you my score...Let's just say the event was a HUGE success and we plan to make this an annual outing. Hopefully next year, our very own Tom Vitale will once again bring his band to play...that's right, not only did we duck pin bowl, but we did it in style with "Vital Synz" rocking the lanes. For additional photos of the event, goto http://firstannualsunfedduckpinbowlinge.shutterfly.com. And, if you know of a good duck pin bowling alley in the San Francisco area...please let me know...my kids are dying to try it.

Posted at 05:54PM Oct 29, 2008 by BVass in General | Comments[2] | Permalink

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Comments:

I have to say I have been involved with Sun for almost 9 years. Early on in my involvement with Sun I thought we could have easily been strong competition for the likes of IBM and Microsoft etc. I loved when the motto was "Happy Employees make Happy Customers." Now I feel like Sun doesn't care for it's customers or it's employees. Why do you ask?

Well Sun neither listens to the wants/needs of it's customers or employees. I don't know who is in place to mediate who is fired during the layoffs which seem to come more and more frequent in the last few years. I however think this needs to be looked into. If you continue to cut back on customer service not only do you stand the risk of over working the people you hold on to, to hard you also cut back on the quality of the service your customers receive, because the hold times are much longer due to less people available to help with their problems. That is not the only problem with said lay offs. Another problem would involve the fact that you are not laying off people according to whether or not the are productive employees. What happens due to this is you actually end up laying off people that were making your production and productivity better. Which in some levels have lead to getting rid of integral parts of your team and then you have to pay them an advance and then rehire them in a matter of weeks after you realize your mistakes. How is that helping Sun? This all needs to be addressed. You would think that with the stock constantly plummeting even after numerous layoffs that the layoffs are not the answer to your problems.

First off you do not do enough to get name recognition. Not only is it one of the best ways to ensure you keep up with you competition you can do it with little cost to you. We all know the Intel sound, the Dell commercials, the HP etc. If you work on getting your name out there you will see a major upturn in your numbers. With the amount of equipment that is given away due to the unsatisfied customers and the need to smooth things out. You could avoid that by telling all of your biggest resources like AT&T, Ebay etc. that you would give the discounts if they mentioned something along the lines of powered by Sun Microsystems. It would be substantial for the company. Also if things are so bad financially for Sun that you can't afford to properly educate the employees you do have, how can you afford to waste those precious funds on the likes of CEC? I think the biggest problems with Sun is that it has it priorities out of line. If you took the funds spent on CEC and applied that to training, advertising and/or raises for your employees you would not only improve their morale but you will be showing them that you care about them and their families especially due to the raising cost at astronomical rates of everything around them. Yet they have not gotten any raises to help keep up with that cost yet you can throw CEC in LA and Vegas how is that? You will also be making them happy and that will pass along to the customers. Which will be great for Sun as well. Sun has the technology to be the best and the brightest but if you don't have someone running the company with a better business know how you will continue to fight an uphill battle. Even with all the best technology in the world with poor business decisions how can you think things will improve? Get rid of the bean counters and hire someone that knows how to cut back cost in the proper places like in CEC, acquiring new businesses, and all the executive perks. Start putting that back into Sun and it's employees. Like in educating them on the new products and giving raises, stop trying to get rid of call out and car allowances and cutting things that are productive and start cutting back on non-sense, Like lavish rentals cars for execs., hotel rooms, business flights. If they really care about Sun they would be able to understand it is for everyone's betterment. Until you start restructuring and re-accessing where Sun is making it's mistakes and fix those and stop thinking layoffs are the answers, Sun will only continue to tread water and never surpass the competition. Just my two cents.

"All great leaders have to first learn how to listen to the people following them in order to learn the past path in which to lead them".

Posted by MT on November 15, 2008 at 10:49 PM EST #

I wanted to add this to my previous comment. When I first became involved with Sun the stock was close $100.00 the further Sun gets from worrying about making its customers and employees happy the more the stock goes down. Now the stock is not even close to ten dollars. Yet another sign that the changes Sun has been making are not to it's benefit.

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Stop laying off the people and cutting back on the few things you still have for Merit , because it is not working in your favor. You need things to help keep your employees from feeling like all their hard work is for naught. Start cutting out needless spending and make better business decisions and you will get your desired change. Sun's technology is hand over fist better than IBM yet IBM is more financially sound then Sun has ever been. The question you have to ask is why?

Microsoft has had layoffs as well, yet they are not getting rid of their service people. Could it be that they know that customer service is the core of every business? They layoff some of their sales people. Which I am saves some much more than getting rid of service. I am sure that the sells teams make more then most of the service team. So in the end you cut out less people and saving more money. In order to compete with the best you have do build on the model of success not just make blind choices.

Posted by MT on November 16, 2008 at 09:11 AM EST #