Comment by DonHopkins
1 year ago
>exhortation
I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".
It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...
I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"
After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.
So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.
One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."
I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.
It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing.
They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.