One of the first things a cub reporter learns in journalism school is the difference between “dog bites man” and “man bites dog” – the latter being news, albeit of the oddball variety, and the former being merely painful.
Technology vendors barking at each other is rarely news. However, one vendor unleashing its lawyers in an attempt to stop a competitor from barking? . . . That has a bit more bite.
Welcome to Sun vs. HP, a dogfight that features Sun President Jonathan Schwartz and his Weblog on one side, with an aggrieved HP and its in-house attorneys on the other.
I’ll try to nutshell it for you: Schwartz in his blog and Sun in its advertising have contended that HP’s Unix operating system, HP-UX, might as well be taken out behind the barn and buried because it has reached the end of the line. Schwartz speaks of this death in the past tense, not merely as an impending event.
HP begs to differ. In a letter to Sun from its in-house counsel and in comments to the press, HP has called Sun’s aspersions against HP-UX “unfounded,” “misstatements of fact” and “misinformation” . . . pretty much everything but un-American. The legal missive gave Sun two weeks to realize the error of its ways and make amends.
Schwartz laughed off the letter while on stage at the Vortex 2004 conference earlier this month. And last week Sun told HP, in effect, “Go pound sand. We’re not taking back a word of it.”
An HP spokeswoman declined an invitation to tell me the company’s next move, but did say, “HP still expects Sun to correct misinformation and stop doing a disservice to customers.”
The lightning rod here has been Schwartz’s blog. It is an unusual medium for such a high-level executive, but an effective one given the author’s way with words and his willingness to tackle controversial topics. (A Sun spokesman told me last week that Schwartz’s blog entries are not lawyered before posting.)
“I think HP faces an enormous challenge,” Schwartz wrote in an Aug. 16 entry. “And it’s not related to the cancellation of PA-RISC, or weakness in their Itanium transition. Or even Dell’s printer onslaught.”
“To me, HP’s problems spawn from the death of their operating system, HP-UX. Like IBM, they’ve elected to ask their customers and [independent software vendors] to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. . . . If you’re a customer, where does that leave you with your HP-UX investments? Facing untimely change – with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS.”
Again, HP insists this is so much hot air. Yet Sun last week answered HP’s lawyers with a point-by-point defense of its contentions.
Who’s got the better case? HP seems sincere in promising continued fidelity to HP-UX. However, Sun mounts a plausible case that HP’s actions belie its words.
Who’s right isn’t the point: What’s notable is that this type of vendor vs. vendor dust-up is as common as, well, dust. Given that fact, what is it about Sun’s offensive that would motivate HP to sic the lawyers on them?
“At the end of the day, Sun should be held accountable for its marketing claims,” the HP spokesperson told me.
HP would be better served to heed the famous words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who, though he pondered free speech long before the Internet, nevertheless got it right: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Brandeis was referring to government enforcement, of course, but the principle ought to apply to bare-knuckled business brawls as well.
HP isn’t going to win this fight with lawyers – and shouldn’t even try.
Direct amicus briefs to buzz@nww.com.
