Tuesday 1 June 2010

The Sun Has Set on a Great Brand

Just a quick note pointing out, once again, that when many of us foresaw gloom and doom from the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems....we were being hippie-pie-in-the-sky optimists.

Item: A couple of days ago, I tried to log into my Sun Developer Network account, so I could grab the latest "official" Java toolset for a Linux VM I was building. I couldn't log in; neither the password that was saved in my password manager nor any other password I could think of would work. I then went through the recover-lost-password form, expecting a reset email to pop into my inbox within a minute or two. An hour later, I had to go do other things. Yesterday, no email.

Finally, today (Tuesday morning), this gem appears in my inbox:

Date: Sun, 30 May 2010 10:07:20 -0700 (PDT)
From: login-autoreply@sun.com
To: jdickey@seven-sigma.com
Message-ID: <12602411.48691.1275239240752.JavaMail.daemon@mailhost>
Subject: Your Sun Online Account Information
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Source-IP: rcsinet15.oracle.com [148.87.113.117]
X-CT-RefId: str=0001.0A090205.4C029B48.0062,ss=1,fgs=0
X-Auth-Type: Internal IP

Thank you for contacting Sun Online Account Support.

We're sorry but a user name for your account could not be determined.

We would be happy to look into this further for you.  Please contact us at @EMAIL_FEEDBACK_CONTACT@.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
Sun Online Account Support

Oracle isn't even bothering to fill in (no doubt database-fed) form-mail fields to keep in touch with current and possible future Sun-originated customers, and the login-autoreply address is no doubt a black hole slaved to /dev/null. If they had sent an HTML email with 48-point red F*** YOU!!! as the entire content, the message received could not have been more clear: you don't matter, go away, throw your money, time and attention at somebody else.

I plan to do precisely that, and make clear to all and sundry precisely why.

3 comments:

Kathy at Sun/Oracle said...

hi, actually login-autoreply@sun.com has always been a "black hole", nothing to do with the acquisition.

There should have been a link in the email you got on how to contact support. Here is one way: https://reg.sun.com/feedback - often this form has chat enabled so someone can look at your account right then.

Sorry for the inconvenience .. we are still here and supporting Sun users ... Web Engineering.

Kathy at Sun/Oracle said...

Thanks for alerting us to the @EMAIL_FEEDBACK_CONTACT@ variable problem. I believe we have fixed it. I just tried a password reset and I got an email pointing me correctly to https://reg.sun.com/feedback rather than the unresolved variable.

BTW, the system will have problems determining a user name for you if you have multiple accounts for the same email address. This would explain "could not be determined" email you got.

Thanks again for alerting us to this problem.

Unknown said...

KKathy, thanks for the reply... I'm just posting a quick note here (and will shortly go follow your link) so that people don't think MY end is a "black hole." I'll update the post itself shortly to reflect more recent events.

Good to hear that some Sun folk are still alive and kicking.