Solaris back in the race

Last week, I wrote about us discarding Solaris for a new project. Most large companies will not care and not listen to their customers.
Many of us have dealt with Verizon, Time Warner, Creative Labs, etc and know what I mean. After all, when you have so many customers, it is cheaper to lose a bunch of them and provide overall bad service than it is to fix real problems. After my short experience with Sun, I assumed it was the same:I WAS WRONG. They do listen!

We are going to start a new project and there are many options available to us. While I’m using mostly Windows for development, I would never consider it an option for a server as I need to be able to sleep without wondering if it has crashed or not; So, the options belong to the Unix world.
There are a lot of flavors but, to me, they are not radically different. I’ve used various systems, from Xenix to Ubuntu and found myself settling for CentOS for servers over time.
At the end of the day, although I work with technology, I am not in love with it, I have better affection for the income derived from it and this means that decisions are really not based on personal preferences.

A lot of people hate Microsoft for various reasons; if you read SlashDot you will find numerous reasons and but also ridiculous rants. I worked with Microsoft employees on some XBox products and I have found them to be very knowledgeable but also dedicated. At the end, I’ve had the personal numbers of a few of them and, while I was working for another company, we were on the same team: we had common goals. Same goes with Intel, where some employees just ‘wanted things to happens’ and they were awesome to work with.
In my experience, this is more valuable than almost anything else a business has to offer.
Now, back to Solaris: A few years ago, I was investigating a solution which involved setting up a large amount of servers. We had so many things on to figure out that time became a precious commodity. Solaris did not make it because we just did not get the DVDs we asked for. Lacking time, we just went ahead with the other options we had handy. It was just a simple little thing.
At the end of the day, when setting up a solution we need to make sure the vendors are reachable and that they will get involved. Back then, we ended up looking at a solution from IBM that covered a lot of our needs: there were other alternatives and much cheaper ones, but I knew one thing: after I was done with it and gone on holidays, the client would have a solid business to rely on if something goes bad. This is worth a lot.

After the post last week, I got contacted by a couple people from Sun. They have looked into the issue I pointed out and addressed it; but also, they showed they care about their product and stand by it.
They reacted quickly and tried to see what they could do to fix the situation. This is a great example of how business should be conducted!
 

During the same period, Time Warner has managed to prove, yet again, they don’t understand anything about customer support :)