From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996 12:39:54 +0800
To: hua@chromatic.com (Ernest Hua)
Subject: Re: Did Sun get a sweetheart deal?
In-Reply-To: <199610040001.RAA15595@ohio.chromatic.com>
Message-ID: <199610040109.SAA23900@slack.lne.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Ernest Hua writes:
> 
> So why did Sun cave in?

I'm not sure they did.  I've seen two quotes from Sun- one
pro-GAK one from Eric Schmidt, one from someone else I
have never heard of who's head of government relation or something
like that, which was pretty anti-GAK.  Schmidt is regarded as
somewhat clueless by a large number of Sun employees.

In addition, I had lunch today with the people I used to work
with/for at Sun, who're probably the most likely to be asked to implement
such a thing.  They haven't heard anything about it and were quite dismayed
at the whole idea.


Oh, and government contracts (especially NASA ones) take a shitload of
time to set up.  The only coercion that a TLA could do with it would
be to threaten to scotch the deal for "national security reasons".
The fact that some deal went through doesn't prove anything.
I think it much more likely that the Govt would use carrots
like possible additional sales or a leg up on competitors.
Hey, it worked on IBM didn't it?
 

-- 
Eric Murray  ericm@lne.com  ericm@motorcycle.com  http://www.lne.com/ericm
PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03  92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF