I feel sorry for the Sun reps.

Our poor Sun salesgrunt was round the other day to give us an "update" on Sun technology and where it's going, and he did try his hardest to be upbeat and "Sun is the way to go", but when it got round to question time he got deflated straight away by a question from one of the PFYs along the lines of; "Which of these products do you think will survive an IBM purchase?"

I'm pretty certain it's someone with shares, probably in the SAM camp, that have leaked the whole purchase thing from the start in the hope of driving up the share price and prodding more bidders to come of out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, as for our poor rep, it has made the Sun sales bods' positions untenable - how can they be expected to sell product when all the customers are getting this very visible death-dive going on in the background? I suspect the best of them are already lining up jobs with competitors or looking to multi-vendor resellers, probably not much fun in this downturn.

Our own rep was stoicly loyal, though, saying he prefered to wait it out and see what the eventual deal brings. In the words of Sir Alan Sugar - "Schmuck!" Always pays to have a back-up plan ready to go, just in case.

All this story confirms is that Sun has been hawking itself round for quite a while (an Oracle-hp alliance would have taken months to discuss), probably over a year, which just makes the ludicrous Sunshiner posts here over the last year all the more comic! Please note, Sunshiners - hp didn't want the crippled Sun software bizz, just the Sun SPARC installed base. Just goes to show that Hurd isn't that big an idiot.