Is Sun moving away from the technical market?

[David Hough]

For current, former, and prospective Sun technical customers who are interested
in making their opinions known to Sun management:   I've been asked to get a
quick sample of opinion from technical customers and end users.    For my
purposes, you're a technical customer if you would ever
notice if the floating-point hardware were disabled.

Some of Sun's competitors, and some commentators,
have been stating that Sun is moving away from the technical market.
Sun spokespersons generally affirm that Sun is interested in and continues
to address the issues of technical customers.

What do YOU think, as a result of YOUR experiences as current, former,
or prospective technical customers?   What's the key evidence supporting
your point of view, and what evidence, if any, tends to contradict it? 
If you have recently changed workstation vendors, what were the key 
decision factors?

Issues that affect all Sun customers, not just technical, don't need to be
considered here.

I will send a summary to participants and to my management in a couple of days.
You might think that it would be easy to get
customer opinions - but with a large enough installed base, it is TOO easy
to get opinions, yet difficult to calibrate them.    So working from a small
self-selected group seems more promising.   Thank you for your consideration.