Comment by coreyh14444
9 hours ago
As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
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They should reexamine that wish.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.
You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.
IIRC they won business awards for this.
Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
We sold web traffic analysis software to Dell Europe, around 1998 or so. They never kept their data more than a week. As the traffic and purchase behaviour they were analysing in the store changed so much every week they said (if I remember correctly) it didn’t make any sense to compare the data over time. I took from that that what they sold every week changed all the time. Of course, data storage and processing was then not as cheap as it is today, so maybe there was more to it.
try adding wifi, you don't get DVD. Remove DVD, you don't get wifi. It's ridiculous. Dell is a joke of a company
Did they learn this from the airlines ?
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
> so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher
I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
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I wonder how effective it really is, over the long term, to generate short-term profit by consuming trust like this.
> For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates.
I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
That’s exactly what enterprise sales is. Call for pricing, tell the absolute upper limit you can spend, and pay.
A nicer way to frame it is: “value based pricing”.
hire a salesperson to give them fake sales numbers and low ball them so you pay less?
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you
This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.
I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
> I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
"I guess I can't pay so much because such a huge fraction of the contract volume goes to my lawyer."
I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
Dell was very much moving this way before modern AI explosion. The inconsistency on pricing alone depending on what rep was helping you also became a problem. I could often times call in direct and order via business line cheaper than dealing with my account rep. No reason to jump through so many hoops.
I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
Just let me buy it and move on.
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Periodic component shortages have been a fact of life in the server business forever. Like a key supplier's factory burns down or something.
The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.
> The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.
Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified.
SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).
(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening.
I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..
I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours.
You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
> Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell.
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds.
1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.
2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
> But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
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One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon
Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
So when we could move to Dell we did.
Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements.
Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
I'm sure I have a memory of someone at Sun UK telling me about how they managed to run up a £30K bar bill at an event....
Yeah that fits. I was in London (though not the City) and it was definitely that sort of scene.
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website:
> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.
Dell was just the only one to callback.
I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.
[0] - https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.
Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
Forcing customers to talk to sales is actually a failure mode.
ordered small item from Dell 7/31, still not received.
And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell.
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
And Redhat[0], and professional services a la Accenture[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
Their old services arm was Kyndryl which they spun out as its own thing
I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.
> IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.
They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.
On the other hand, Sun and DEC hardware from then still works today, if you care to power it on. How many dell devices do?