If You Want To Win, Give It Away

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystem's chief geek, is a guy with a ponytail (scoring extra points on the Long Blonde Tail-o-meter right there) who knows a thing or two about marketing. During Mashup Camp's closing ceremonies, he gave away a brand-spanking new, super-fast server to the Best Mashup winner, Podbop. (Yay, Taylor!)

Jonathan has done something else notable this week: he's giving it away to the masses. A high ticket item, one might say: the Sun Fire T2000 server. With a price tag of $7,795 for the fully loaded model, qualified organizations will get to take it for a complimentary 60-day test drive. Sun will even pay for the gas (or shipping in this case) whether or not they end up purchasing it. How do we know all this? Well, for starters, he blogged about it this week.

Here's a bonus: blog about its performance once you've received it (either positively or otherwise) and Sun might just let you keep it for free.

Will all of this result in sky-high marketing costs for Sun (not to mention minor heart palpitations for Sun's financial analysts)? Probably. Will it get people talking about Sun and its products? I'd bet my blog that it will.

Smart, strategic, and very Naked.

Comments

[Taylor]

Thanks Tracy!

I did find it amusing that on J Schwartz' blog he suggested I blog about the server because I was their 'target market'. Hopefully he was mistaken because I don't know how many of my 20 year old friends can afford an $8000 server :)