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.
