The way I found out about it was in an e-mail from Jon Stahl of Avici. "I was wondering if I could poll the ESNUG community for recent experiences regarding the use of HP workstations instead of Sun as a platform for EDA," asked Jon. "The reason I bring this up is that we have had a ridiculous amount of trouble with our Sun hardware and software over the last few years, and we are at the point of researching alternatives."

After Jon Stahl's letter ran in ESNUG 360, I received five user letters that pretty much confirmed Jon's problem. "The Wall Street Journal just did an article on the problems customers are having with Sun servers," wrote Scott Evans of Sonics. "I think Jon Stahl will get some small comfort in knowing he's not alone."

This was no biggie. As a hardware designer I know how things can go wrong, and I thought it would be just a matter of time before the good guys at Sun fixed things. I ran those five user letters in ESNUG 361 and went online to check out The Wall Street Journal article that Scott mentioned.

That's where I was sadly let down. Apparently, the external memory caches on Sun's Ultra servers were running into parity problems, causing spontaneous crashes. This was affecting a lot of Sun customers. "Paul McGuckin, an analyst with Gartner Group who deals regularly with major corporate customers, said that roughly 60 major Gartner clients have reported problems with as many as several hundred Sun servers," reported the Journal article. But what was disturbing was the statement that "Sun initially required customers who reported the problem to sign a nondisclosure agreement."

Where the norms set by Microsoft, IBM and Intel are of paranoia, control and secrecy - Sun has historically been a breath of fresh air with its openness and honesty. You can use Java because Sun open-sourced it. Sun will even give you the source code for StarOffice and Solaris. Openness is one of the keys to Sun's corporate culture. But now here was this strange "new" Sun acting like Intel when the Pentium bug first broke. Virtually all of the 30 angry letters on the Journal's online Web site cited disgust not at the cache bug itself but at how Sun tried to cover it up.

Most MBA programs teach the "New Coke" story as a cautionary tale about not fixing what ain't broke. I'm hoping that the management at Sun has learned that suddenly adopting a new closed-door, adversarial corporate culture during a crisis isn't good for business. And they should occasionally drink an Old Coke to remind them of Sun's original formula for success.