Scott McNealy publicly lambasted over Solaris

A GROUP called Save Solaris took out a half page ad in the San Jose Mercury News this morning which lays into Sun Microsystems for failing to support the Solaris X86 user community.

The ad describes Sun's behaviour with Solaris as "a total disconnect with the Solaris X86 user community" -- he pulled the plug -- and a "complete betrayal of trust".

The group wants Scott to publicly apologise for pulling plans to ship Solaris Version 9 for the X86 architecture alongside the SPARC release in May.

The advert says: "Scott has not admitted that Sun mismanaged the Solaris X86 product line and under utilized it both within and outside his organization."

The real beef is that on January 8th this year, Sun said Solaris 9 X86 would be indefinitely delayed, "disregarding its established practice of providing at least one notice in an official end-of-life statement and failing to contact customers directly".

They say that the article was in the technical press in February. Actually we wrote that story in November 2001, several months before that date. For which we got scorched... probably for being too early with the story.

The advert challenges McNealy to meet face to face with the Save Solaris Organization and the technical press in a public forum.

He would then be brought to task for a "failure to understand his customers". We suspect the INQ would not be invited to such a forum.

The group has a Website at this address. And here's the ad, in relatively small PDF sizeage. µ

See Also
X86 Solaris pipe dream up in smoke
Sun charges fee to download "free" Slowaris.