IT suppliers: User Perspective

AnotherDaveB writes "The Register's 10,000 strong reader panel was asked in December for their perceptions of the major IT vendors. The results are now in.
Highlights: Sun's great, MS sucks."

Not very surprised by this

[WidescreenFreak]

Had this survey come out a few years ago, I would have called "Bullshit!" But recently Sun seems to be bringing some common-sense, "what techies want" designs and prices to the table.

The article focuses a lot on the implementation of Opteron, and that's really what Sun wants to hear because that was a big gamble for them. It's been paying off really well, though. The good things that I've heard about the Opteron systems vastly outweighs the bad. I just wish that Sun didn't pull that moronic marketing blunder for the Ultra 20. Advertise: $29.95 per month! Reality: $395 per year in annual installments, and if your credit card is set to expire before then we're cahrging you everything at once! They could have sold a ton of Ultra 20s if they had stuck to their $29.95/month advertising slogan. I know that definitely I'd have one.

Now we'll have to see how Sun fares with their latest low-energy-consumption push.

I'm personally pleased to see this. Sun for a long time was barely holding their head above water, thanks to being weighed down by Scott McNealy's arrogance. We're Sun! You will pay four times the cost of a comparable non-Sun system and you will be pleased because our hardware has the Sun logo on it. Sun finally seems have shed that attitude and it appears to be paying off. But considering that a lot of people still look at Sun with skepticism, all that it will take is one major blunder to ruin it for them. (Does anyone else remember the widespread UltraSPARC, 8MB eCache error problems? Or the memory DIMMs from one of their four manufacturers that caused sporradic system crashes?)

Me, either.

[Roadkills-R-Us]

In fact, it all lined up with my perceptions. I just wish they had covered other suppliers a bit more. I'd love to see the full data.

And I'd love to see a major survey of just OSes handled this way.

The HP and IBM Reactions seem right

[sasha328]

Having dealt with both of them (or been exposed to some of their projects), I can say the "negative conclusions" are spot on.
IBM tends to provide very complex solutions that take years to develop, that by the time they're being testes they are so far from the original specs that it's not funny.
HP is good at confusing themselves. The comment in there about them being too big is quite true. They're selling themselves as a "global" company, but they can't operate like that. It's an uphill battle to get the sam