Dan: definitely agree on the convenience front, though i think in Sun’s case it’s a bit of both. if all you were selling, as an example, were expensive UltraSparc machines, it wouldn’t matter that you had a phenomenal experience because that would be a non-starter for a lot of the folks in the markets we’re talking about.

as to serving SMBs, not that i can think of, unless we throw in oranges like Google.

I largely agree with you about the depth of Sun’s issues with servicing small customers well, with one exception: I think that it’s actually more important to have a phenomenally good purchasing & support experience than it is to have absolutely top-of-the-line products. Take Dell, for example: they lost the SMB market lead when they decided to cut costs in their core competency — lightning-fast purchase and good support response. There were better-performing machines out there, but top-of-the-line price-performance isn’t actually the deciding factor for the SMB market. That honor goes to the total time the IT guy has to spend thinking about the actual box, including the time it takes to purchase it.

Sun’s going to have to change a lot to become the vendor of choice for startups, and like you said it’s going to be very difficult to do that without disturbing their existing customer base. In fact, are there any companies out there besides Microsoft that service SMBs and large enterprises well?