HP swooping in on Sun customers

Hey guys this is a really cool article that I came across

Hewlett-Packard has certainly benefited from the uncertainty over Sun Microsystems' future, and now it's lined up a few partners to help win over more Sun customers.

In light of Oracle's failure thus far to seal its takeover of Sun, HP announced on Tuesday that it has teamed up with Microsoft, Novell, and Red Hat to offer further incentives to Sun customers.

HP reported that during the 12 months ending October 31, it scooped up more than 350 customers from Sun with offers of specialized services and support, and financial incentives through its HP Complete Care program. Now, the company said, it has enhanced this program with the help of its new partners to give Sun customers what HP is selling as "peace of mind."

HP said its new Complete Care program will offer such benefits as a 50 percent discount on Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Fundamentals training, 25 percent off Red Hat Global Training, and greater support through its Migration Competency Center in France.

Thanks to its new partnerships, HP said, it can also offer customers the flexibility to choose from among server operating systems, including Unix, Windows Server, Suse Linux, Red Hat Linux, and even Sun's own Solaris.

Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun in mid-April, but concerns from the European Commission and other parties over an Oracle-owned MySQL have stalled the deal. Recent promises from Oracle to preserve and protect MySQL seem to have eased EC concerns. But each day the deal remains unfinished, Sun customers likely wonder whether they should take their business elsewhere.

A recent IDC report showed that Sun had suffered a 35 percent drop in third-quarter sales year over year, compared with much smaller declines for rivals HP and IBM.

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Web Surfing

There is a lot of controversy brewing lately over the actions of Google regarding an individual's web activity. First of all, based on your prior web searches, Google is now ranking websites for you when you perform the same search the following time. In other words, if you had chosen to search for “jewelry,” the results would be displayed and you would choose the suitable choice. The next time you performed the same search, instead of the results being displayed based on “adwords,” they will be structured according to the websites you last visited when searching this same topic. This new practice takes place regardless if you are logged in or not, and Google considers it to be more of a helpful tool rather than a nuisance. This video explains this process further in depth.

In addition, the little cookies that are on the Google website also allow perspective companies to strategically place ads based on your web profile of user activity. This new cookie based personalization feature does allow users to opt out, but because of the value we place on our time and the lack of knowledge needed to execute this process, more than likely this won’t occur. Many have commented that they fear users will not discover new sites if they are continually ranked in order based on past preferences. One more thing that Google frequently does is to place search results of companies that they are in partnerships with, without disclosing that information. Google claims that they never manipulate data but some, think otherwise.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Google needs to take into account how others perceive what they are doing and ensure their customers that they are committed to providing them best service possible. It would be very easy for a current Google customer to switch to another search engine and not think twice about it! Who will win and who will lose is the biggest question now. I hope you have a moment to decide what you think about this new feature.