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From: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser)
Newsgroups: net.works,net.rumor
Subject: Sun Microsystems Customer Responsiveness
Message-ID: <121@tove.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Feb-85 12:11:01 EST
Article-I.D.: tove.121
Posted: Wed Feb  6 12:11:01 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Feb-85 02:15:16 EST
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD
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Xref: watmath net.works:894 net.rumor:639

What has been other people's experiences with Sun Sales
Reps?  Ours has been terrible.  For instance, for
an entire week we have been trying, both with the local
rep and with the district manager in the Washington, D.C.
area, just to get a phone call returned.  Secretaries claim
the people are in, will be right back, etc.  (It isn't as
though they were all at Usenix).  Is it so hard to return
a phone call?  Is it just our local people or is poor
responsiveness a Sun trademark?

This is just the latest in a long series of disasters, in which
a few of the things that have happened are:  Sun submits a 
bid for N workstations, then when they are awarded the contract
they try to renegotiate everything in the bid (this drives
the purchasing dept. of a large state university nuts).
Later, when all is supposedly settled, Sun comes back and wants
to renegotiate again.  And these negotiations are not for
things like delivery times (see below), where slippage can happen
even with the best of efforts.  They are things like configurations
and prices.

As far as delivery goes, what have been people's experiences been
with Sun's promises?  We were supposed to get an initial
installment of 3 workstations in January (which is still 120days
ARO), and nothing has arrived yet.  And we cannot get our phone
calls returned....
-- 
Spoken: Mark Weiser 	ARPA:	mark@maryland	Phone: +1-301-454-7817
CSNet:	mark@umcp-cs 	UUCP:	{seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark
USPS: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742