HP slings mud with FUD about Sun's future

WHILE SUN is busy spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about IBM's AIX and the purity of its own Unix licence, another competitor has McNealy's firm lined up in its sights according to a competitive document seen by the INQUIRER.

Yesterday Sun began running a series of adverts aimed at causing jitters about IBM customers, but HP has already come up with a list of questions its sales force should ask Sun customers.

Those questions ask whether Sun customers should ponder a firm with stock losses of 95% in two years, revenue falls of 33% and losses in six out of the seven last financial quarters.

It invites HP sales people to ask their customers whether Sun will survive given its financial situation, and the shift from "proprietary to industry standard" hardware and software.

The document also wonders whether Sun can continue to act as an "island", alienating itself from firms like Intel and Microsoft.

And HP is obviously stung by the accusation that it's a printer company, retaliating by saying that it ships five times the number of servers that Sun ships.

It throws the FUD mud at Sun Fires too, claiming that the UltraSPARC III has reliability problems and "glitches" that result in customer systems going down.

It wants to know why Sun Fires don't have chip kill memory, and why it changed its position on publishing TPC-C benchmarks.

HP asks why its mid range systems outperform Sun in benchmarks with less than half the processors.

It wants to know why Sun isn't using the Itanium platform. It doesn't seem to want to know why it isn't using the Opteron platform.

It wants to know dozens of answers to other questions too, but all this demonstrates to us is that the bitter fight for share in a strangulated IT business is causing the HP competitive marketing folk to slightly lose it.

If you're a corporate customer, you must surely be watching this with all sorts of amusement, knowing as you do that now you really do hold the whip hand. µ