Jonathan Schwartz’s blog
Here is one of the best examples of direct communication from an important executive. Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, a computer company with annual sales exceeding 11 billion dollars, opened his blog last summer.
He writes about the computer industry with an exceptional freedom. He already attacked Hewlett-Packard, one of its main competitors, blaming the company for its lack of vision. He also accused Red Hat, one of the major distributors of the Linux operating system, to lock in its customers by using a proprietary strategy.
Yesterday, he published on his blog an open letter to Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO. He says that many Sun customers would like to use IBM software on the latest version of Sun’s operating system, Solaris 10, but that IBM has not ported its software to this OS. In fact, he accuses IBM to force users to use computing platforms from IBM if they want to run DB2 or WebSphere. Here is an example.
We’ve repeatedly passed along customer interest in having IBM support Solaris 10 with WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Rational and MQSeries products. Customers have made repeated calls to you and your staff. Those same customers have now asked me to begin communicating with you in a more public and visible way - they’d like the choice to run IBM products on Solaris 10, and they’re feeling that your withholding support is part of a vendor lock-in strategy. A strategy to trap them into IBM’s proprietary Power5 platform only.
Frankly, that behavior is reminiscent of an IBM history many CIO’s would like to forget.
For more information, you can read this analysis by Peter Galli, published by eWEEK, “Sun’s Schwartz Calls Out IBM on Lack of Support for Solaris on x86.”
Finally, here is a link to the corporate page of Sun News. Depending on the moment you visit this page, you’ll see on the left column several links to other Sun’s employees blogs or only to Jonathan Schwartz’s blog.
