Sun Microsystems Executive Jonathan Schwartz writes a blog (which is a rather big deal). His most recent post summarizes the sales challenges when competitors are writing Sun’s obituary. Schwartz’s story is quite useful and interesting:

The customer started by telling us what our competitors had been saying about Sun, our platforms, and our future over the past two years. HP told him Sun was going out of business. IBM told him the future was all about linux, and that Sun was all about lock-in. Both competitors expressed a sympathetic concern that we weren’t “going to make it.” How charitable. The CIO wanted to know why they were wrong. This was going to be one of those “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” sessions. And we got right into it.
He told me consolidation was his number one priority. That’s why they were standardizing on HP. I asked “Which systems?” He responded “their enterprise systems.” I asked, “Itanium?” Wondering why they’d introduce a fork (new apps, new OS, new skills, and the expense of porting) if they were trying to consolidate platforms. He said they weren’t interested in Itanium. “No way, we’re going with PA-RISC.” I asked, “But isn’t that an end of life’d platform?” Silence. “Well, yes, I guess it would be.” How times change. Maybe HP had a specialty service for dead platform consolidation.