Slashdot Mirror
Co-founder Joy to leave Sun
TheLinuxWarrior writes "An article
at CNET says Bill Joy, Sun Micro co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company." You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It really is a Joy to leave Sun. ... :-)
Thank you, I'll be here all evening.
~ kjrose
It's a conspiracy, hear me out before you think I'm off my rocker.
"Sun" has 3 letters, so does "SCO" and "Joy". "Bill" is also the name of some guy at Microsoft.
SCO claims it is making no money (0), there are eight letters in "MICROS~1" (8) and SCO thinks they are the sole owner of UNIX and Linux (1). Apply those numbers to SUN:
rot0 S == S
rot8 U == C
rot1 N == O
That's not all; note how SCO and Sun both start with "S" which looks a lot like a dollar sign? What is the 3rd letter from the right in "MICROS~1"? An "S". 3 companies with "S" in their names, third letter from the right is an "S". S looks like a dollar sign.. you know the inevitable conclusion..
The above facts speak for themselves: Bill Joy is in the pockets of SCO and Microsoft. He's leaving Sun to enjoy his millions of ill-gotten gain.
Don't even think of getting me going on SGI in the equation.
now where is my tin foil hat..
Trolling is a art,
You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
Geez, The man is a scientist, give him a break. Asking for a good picture of a scientist is like asking for a serious shot of Alf.
I'm tired of bombing the universe
Joe Angry will now step in and fill the vacated spot .
Here's hoping that he founds a new start-up with a guy named "Pride"...
Whatever it is, I'm going to buy stock in it. This guy is a genius, and has truly initiated world-changing technologies. I'm going to be closely watching to see where he goes, because it's going to be impressive.
I wonder, though, what this means for the future of Sun...
You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
That is the better picture.
You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
Let's see a good picture of you, Taco.
This guy looks like a GQ model compared to any given slashdot editor.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That was Websters adoptive parents last name.
Remember the one where Webster got sued by the RIAA? What a tearjerker.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!
Cmon, we bad looking geeks take pride in our bad pictures. Its something like having a lot of cables under the table, messy desktop etc. That picture must make Joy proud.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
"You'd think after two decades of working at Sun, they could've found a better picture!"
How about this one?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I dunno I always get worried when a company is generally in trouble and people leave. However it might in turn be a good thing as it depends on his motives if he feels that he is burnt out and wants a fresh challenge.
Of course I can think of at least 1 company where there is large reductions but the people in the top still live in the ivory tower.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The other Sun folks probably checked his past history and discovered that he wrote VI. No wonder he's "leaving." ;)
For those who don't know, this is sort of the original founder of BSD.
He wrote the BSD IP stack while at Berkeley (BSD, duh).
Let's hope he works on his terms somewhere and stays away from the business/corporate world.
And he was responsible for vi. For this I cannot decide whether he should be praised as a computer great or be disgraced as the author of the greatest horrible-excuse-for-an-editor known to man.
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Wasn't he in the 80's Super Group Foreigner? Or Journey?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
How can he be an innovative, impressively accomplished UNIX(r) guy?
HE HAS NO BEARD!!!
do() || do_not();
Not quite the same. Ballmer's more of a comedian, so they'll just lose a bit on the relaxation end of things. Some Seinfeld tapes should cover it.
First Love, now Joy! What's NEXT!?!?
--- Tao
The article says sun was co-founded by Scott mcneally an Bill Joy. Actually there were 4 of them out of which 2 have already quit. So with the third guy on the way out it leaves only Scott behind.
Bill Joy can easily take a lot of credit for Java though
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Here is a cool 20 year old interview with him, written as far as I can see just after the first Mac came out. It makes for interesting reading:
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
:q!
Damn, cackhanded typing missed the links
THAT Microsoft photo (from 1979 I believe) is at this link.
================
Like fiction? Try espresso stories
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
This does not bode well for Sun. Bill Joy was truly a visionary and they are going to have to make significant changes in R&D strategy to compensate for this loss. Note that SUNW stock is reacting accordingly, I expect we'll see $2.80 before the end of '03.
Joy is such a luddite that there really is no threat of him starting another technology company. It's likely he will pursue more writing and pontificating, while Sun will flounder aimlessly as they seek a niche in this new technology market.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
It's unusual for founders to leave like this.
This is probably over a major senior management disagreement. A dispute about the best way for Sun to haul it's ass out of the fire. What other subject would they have time to talk about at Sun HQ? McNealy is schitzophrenic, one day he's wearing a penguin suit the next day he's funding SCO's fud campaign against Linux to slow down SUN's haemorraging bottom line.
I guess Bill was on the losing side. The last few things I have read in the trade press (mostly from some ponytailed hippie VP named Johnathan Schwartz) sounded like Sun still hasn't got that they need to take bold risks to stay relevent in today's computing world.
So by virtue of having stayed silent I think Bill Joy has more of a clue about company direction then these other clowns.
Sun (like the town of Gotham) needs an enema. If I was in McNealy's shoes I would hire somebody like Tim O'Reilly to come in and give the company a wake up call on corporate strategy.
Bill and Gene
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
This is how a true geek thinks of himself.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
Considering the chauvinisistic tone of the post, it was correctly moderated as off-topic.
Lots of Indians have done great things in IT, and so have lots of americans, russians, french, chinese, irish so on so forth. So what was the point the grand-parent trying to make ?
I am an indian too, but this kind of stupid superiority complex, that we indians rule the IT is very reprehensible.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Sun's traditional products have been Unix workstations, and because there necessary for unix workstations, unix servers. And of course software to run on them.
In the grand scheme of things, only recently has Sun started producing realy big boxes. And simotaniously, the need for big boxes has decreased: its clusterd micros as far as the eye can see.
For a general purpose unix workstation, a PC with Linux is cheeper, and more powerfull.. I daresay that the likes of Redhat is easier to manage then Solaris. For high end deskops for visualization, get a (Intel based) SGI with its fancy software. For entry level server, linux rocks. For mid range stuff, a cluster of linux boxen on Intel based SMP boxes is better then a single, or a smaller cluster of Suns. And for realy high end stuff, IBM is the only game in town: whatever else you can say about them they have made rock solid mainframes for 50 years, that work all the time, period. If you need such a machine, why would you risk getting one from a company that has been in that market for what? 2 years.
I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.
So why? Why would anyone ever go to Sun for anything?
Having to stare at a crying baby face for a Sun while they drink their Java before starting their day all because Joy has left their lives...
Its time to go. He may actually be a professor at a college and work on grants. They are more liberal and he does not have to worry about researching topics that profitable.
http://saveie6.com/
Article from SFGate:
Michael Dell, who built an empire selling computers based on other companies' innovations, argued Monday that the future in the technology market belongs to players who embrace industry standards, not proprietary systems.
The 38-year-old chief executive of Dell Inc. also strongly suggested that one of his company's top Silicon Valley rivals, Sun Microsystems, may never get back on its feet because it's stuck in a business model that no longer works.
"I think there are parts of the industry that will never recover, and the reason is that their business is fundamentally based on things that people aren't going to buy very much of anymore," Dell told The Chronicle after his keynote speech at OracleWorld, Oracle's annual user conference in San Francisco.
"They're waiting for (demand for proprietary systems) to come back," he added. "Sorry, it ain't going to happen."
Larry Singer, Sun's senior vice president for global market strategies, disputed Dell's view of the Santa Clara company and the trends in the technology industry.
"When Michael Dell gets up there and says those who don't follow industry standards won't make it, it's a bit disingenuous," he said in a phone interview.
"Innovation still matters. Market standards come from new innovations and new technologies."
Like other major companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM, the Texas firm sells computers, servers and other hardware based on widely used technologies developed by such companies as Intel and Microsoft.
On the other hand, Sun, which was once recognized as the top provider of corporate computing, has been a major industry player by offering products based mainly on its proprietary systems.
Asked if he believed that the struggling Sun would never recover, Dell, who typically shies away from comments on competitors, answered: "I sort of said that, but I didn't say that.
"But if you look at their peak revenues and where they are now, it's a pretty big difference, right?" he added. "And if you look at what people are buying now and what they were buying then, it's a big difference."
Singer defended Sun's strategy and performance.
"For Michael Dell, his definition of a market standard is the company that's selling the most today, and that's a pretty easy standard to pick," Singer said. Citing the rapid expansion of Sun's Java technology, particularly in mobile computing, he added, "The definition of what a standard is is beginning to change."
Dell's remarks underscored the debate over the role of innovation and research and development in the tech industry as top players, such as Dell, Sun and HP, maneuver for advantage in the anticipated rise in corporate spending on technology.
Dell Inc. became a tech behemoth by selling directly to consumers and keeping its spending on research and development down.
But rivals like HP and Sun have portrayed the Texas firm as a technological lightweight that grew on the backs of other companies' hard work in research and development.
Dell Inc. has made inroads in the low-end server market, defined as systems under $100,000 each.
But its critics scoff at the company's bid to move up the corporate technology market, arguing that only companies that invest in innovation can afford to compete in the mid-range and higher-end corporate markets.
Sun lost $2.38 billion in its fiscal year that ended in June, compared with a loss of $587 million the previous year. But the company has remained a respected technology innovator, particularly in the high-end market.
"The companies that will survive will be those that innovate technologies," and that means spending on research and development, Singer said.
But Dell has been unfazed by such criticism. In the interview, he reaffirmed his belief that hefty R&D budgets can be overrated and don't necessarily lead to hi
Sun has lost over 95% of its shareholders' non-cash equity the last 3 years. More importantly, McNealy has lost serious credibility. I worked at Sun as a contractor for 2 years 10 years ago. Sun had a collection of really bright people, but the decision making process was flawed even then. McNealy had aspect of a class act. Unlike many Silicon Valley execs, he actually worked to be visible. The basic problem here though: the old guard that made these guys has largely been booted or is horribly demoralized(at least the Sun employees/alumni I've kept in touch with). Furthermore, Sun has no process for spotting the folks that are right even when it means being unpopular-which in a highly competitive business is just plain deadly. McNealy just hasn't been able to resist surrounding himself with a bunch of yes-men.
I dont know Bill Joy at all but from his accomplishments and his contributions like this one http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.htm l he seems like a great mind. He admits that he is not a scientist as someone in the previous postings have indicated. He is more a computer architect. His view is that scientists have a bigger role to play in advancement of computing than computer engineers.
But most importantly he has pointed to the much needed change to human ideal of a utopian world. He urges us to change ultimate human goal to compassion from blind pursuit of scientific knowledge. In fact, I think he quit his pursuit of technology and he is going to be in the realm of fighting battles against unbridled pursuit of scientific excellence which has the potential of a larger destruction than the current dystopia of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
all the best in the pursuit Bill. Its great to see people believe in and pursue goals that are aligned with the bigger objective than most can see or comprehend but reap the benefits of. Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos had a chapter called "Who thinks of Mother Earth?" which showed human parochialism. Bill has echoed this sentiment quite strongly and persuasively in his articles and work which talks about maximising narrow gains at the expense of larger humanity wide goals.
It is amazing how most of the American tech press is either ignorant of this or does not want to acknowledge it. Maybe it has something to with Khosla being an Indian immigrant and therefore not worthy of serious consideration. I mean, placing Khosla alongside superhuman prophetic 'native' American geniuses like Bill Joy and Scott McNeally? C'mon, the audacity! It is almost subconscious, the way immigrant contributions to Silicon Valley are automatically forgotten. And weeded out of its historical accounts so thoroughly that anyone like your truly who complains about this is considered insane and will probably be modded down to Flamebait -1. Heck, I don't care. Let the truth be known.
The idea of Sun was hatched in 1982 in Khosla's mind when he was a Stanford Business School grad student. The idea was to team up with Andy Bechtolscheim who at the time was licensing his workstation design idea to companies in Silicon Valley.
Khosla wanted Bechtolsheim to join in a partnership with him to build the workstations for sale. Khosla already had experience starting a company called Daisy Systems which went on to become one of the most successful IPOs of 1984. Anyways, he recruited Scott McNeally to help in the business side of things. Now they had two business people and a hardware expert. All they needed was a software expert to cover all facets of the product. And thats when they roped in Bill Joy, who was just 27 like the other 3, but unlike them was already nationally famous in the CS community.
Now after reading this story, tell me if the idea of Sun was not born in Khosla's mind instead of Bechtolscheim's or McNeally's or Joy's.
Q: What do you call one senior executive leaving Sun?
A: A start, at least.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can blame them for not trying. Anyway, how do you make money by creating yet another programming language? The OAK language was initially designed as a home appliance platform. It was mainly written by a few (less than ten) programmers in about one and a half year. However, they didn't quite succeeded in selling their product. The appliance manufacturers weren't all that excited about putting Motorola processors and megs of RAM in toasters and VCR's, while the interactive TV companies chose a different solution.
After a few failures a new radical decision was taken. The OAK language was redesigned (Bill Joy was the man behind the transformation) to run on desktop computers, with the Web development in mind, and so Java was born - in just a few months! The source code was set free in order to gain market share (not so in later Java versions, I beleive) - and hey, for a failed project, it's quite impressive (even if it isn't such a great source of income).
Sun make a considerable amount of money from Java. They sell support, they sell IDEs, they sell J2EE licences. They give the low-end stuff (J2SE and Forte community edition) away free to encourage widespread use of the language.
Lately, Sun has has two really big problems holding it back. Those problems are named Scott McNealy and Bill Joy. Stuck in unixland. They were the only "minicomputer" company that didn't jump to Windows NT back in the early 1990's, and they won big time on that bet. Unisys, Data General, etc. where are they now?
Sun stuck with Unix and it turned out to be a good play for them. Now the big man on campus is Linux, and the Sun top brass think they can make the same play again. But this time it's different:
I would also hate to see OpenOffice orphaned. We need this package.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!