CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who took over for Sun co-founder Scott McNealy last week. Users also ticked off a list of changes they want Sun to make, although they largely viewed Schwartz's appointment as a sign of management continuity at the company.

Sam Thomas, information systems supervisor for the city of Oakland, Calif., said Sun needs to make its sales organization easier for customers like him to work with. The city uses a range of Sun systems and storage equipment, but Thomas said Sun has too many layers of managers that have to get involved in decisions on sales issues -- a problem that has persisted for years.

"The salesman had to go talk to his boss, his boss had to talk to his boss, and then his boss talked to his boss -- and then the decision would trickle down," Thomas said. "When you want an answer, you want an answer."

Daniel Grim, executive director of networks and systems at the University of Delaware in Newark, called on Schwartz to improve the support for Solaris running on Sun's Opteron-based x64 systems among independent software vendors.

"I'd like to have a better understanding of what their strategic directions really are relative to Sparc vs. Opteron," Grim said. "We're excited about the Opteron-based systems, but we also like to run Solaris, and we don't see [independent software vendors] following Solaris onto Opteron."