Sun should be doing...

Recently there was very interesting topic on Campus
ambassador mail list. It started with a post: “What do you think Sun should be
doing to come back to profitable growth?” I think it was kind of self-criticism
among the Sun’s new and young people.

I want to share some of the answers from that subject with
you. Which one is true or which is false, read and see:

-Charge an upfront license fee for Solaris. Still be freely
downloadable, still be open source, but you cannot get support until you pay
the license fee. Sun has a bad habit of leaving money on the table.

-Completely overhaul our marketing and advertising.



Our products are good, but our message is not. I have seen many companies with
great products and weak marketing fall by the wayside as companies with great
marketing and good, fair, weak, or even no products have flourished. If we take
our good products and combine them with good marketing/advertising, we will
win. We should start with a single, solid, simple, customer-focused message
that covers everything we do.

-We still seem to think that having the best product is the
only thing we need to do to be successful; despite a long history to the
contrary (inside and outside Sun).  We constantly build great products
then utterly fail to market them aggressively.  Until we understand that, we
will continue to have great products with zero or low market-share.

-Know our customers better.  We will find revenue
opportunities.  A case in point:  I run an Open OS user group. 
I do not see anyone from Sun talking to the attendees about what they would
like to see in our products and services.  Marketing should be there
working the conference room to get the relevant data.

-Sales & Distribution - I will add this as a success
factor as well.  In IT, there is an ecosystem - other vendors and partners
one needs to work with in order to be successful.  How we sell products to
customers (indirectly and directly), who we partner with, and who our products
work best with all have tremendous impact on product sales

-I feel Sun is still a domestic US
company. Learn more from Toyota,
Honda and Sony.

Japan is #2 GDP
country and China
is (practically #2) also the same. There are Markets. We do not have even a
half of marketing and advertising budgets compared with that of US.

-I do not see Sun taking a "Strategic
Action."   Sun is classically strong on projecting a
"Strategic Vision", but I do not see any actions against these
visions.  Great ideas but no actions to that give it ownership and
accountability.  In most cases, we encourage partners or customers to
adopt our vision, but we loose the perception of ownership of that vision.

-We waste too much time saying "Our products are
great", spread some message targeting why these product will make customer
look great. Eg: Talk about no virus in Solaris 10.

These are some of the ideas that I found, they could be
useful for a company. If we know our strength and weaknesses, every thing can
be easier for us to achieve to success