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by James Robertson.
Original Post: McNealy is 'spooky smart'?
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Herein lies the disconnect. McNealy and his senior team are spooky smart and have thought hard and long about how our industry works. The top of the house at Sun has architected a plausible, affordable and practical alternative path to the Microsoft hegemony.
Unfortunately, this message isn't the one being delivered by the Sun sales force, which is perceived by most IT leaders as being little more than coin-operated box sellers. Sun's sales force is the least influential and respected of all the major vendors.
This is just too amusing. So Sun's sales guys are selling the wrong stuff, and it's because they lack vision? Let me explain something very, very simple about sales reps - they sell based on their compensation plans - i.e., they try to sell what will best reward them. Who sets those rewards? Why, that would be senior management - you know, those guys that Thornton May seems to think are Spooky Smart. So smart, in fact, that they have set up the sales compensation plans so as to prevent the sales of the things they claim to want to sell. Do I know this for a fact? No, I haven't seen the Sun comp plans. However, I have worked with direct sales staff for years, and I know how they operate. If Sun's reps aren't selling something - across the board - then it's an artifact of their compensation plans
I think Thornton May needs to go find a different set of adjectives to describe Sun's management.
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