Sun Lets Customers Rate Products, Amazon Style

Published: June 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we all know all too well, all server vendors lie--er, accentuate the positive--about their products. You will very rarely hear them say they made a wrong move on a technology, or that something doesn't perform up to par. It's all spit and polish, memorized phrases, feeds and speeds, and market stats.

But, as an underdog in the X64 market and a company that is trying to breathe new life into its Sparc platform, Sun Microsystems has to do something to get the word out that it is a different company with different products. Sun believes zealously in its own products these days, just as it used to seven or eight years ago before UltraSparc chips and servers were delayed and Windows and Linux took over a lot of the work in the data centers of the world. But Sun doesn't have a huge advertising budget, like Microsoft, or at least the company doesn't think it can afford one. (With billions of dollars in the bank after spending $4.8 billion acquiring StorageTek last year, it could have easily spent a few billion dollars on sales, marketing, and channel development; but it didn't.) In any event, being all about community and participation these days, Sun's chief executive officer, Jonathan Schwartz, says that the company is rolling out Amazon-style customer reviews and ratings for its products.

Schwartz made his announcement though his personal blog. "A very wise man once said, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant'--and in my view, exposing our internals to the outside world also helps us respond to problems more rapidly. True, we have to expose the occasional unhappy customer (I hear this one, in particular, recently became happy), but we expose them to people who can help, too - from within Sun, or within the community. We can't solve problems we don't know about. Like the good justice said, sunlight's a good disinfectant."

Schwartz says that the company will start providing ratings for selected products at first, but will eventually span the Sun product range, right up to the biggest, baddest Unix boxes it peddles. This could start a whole new trend in honesty.