On the Record: Scott McNealy

Sequoia writes "There's a worthwhile interview with Sun CEO Scott McNealy at sfgate. I've always had a hard time seeing how Sun has any long-term staying power. I'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings, or at least he doesn't want to talk about them. 'First of all, I don't get paid to feel.' Sure you do, dude. The best decisions come from the integration of feeling and thought. If feelings don't matter, you can by replaced by a computer. He does a beautiful job putting Dell in his place. 'Michael Dell is the greatest spare parts distributor out there. He'll get you a piston ring or a carburetor or a crank shaft at a really low cost.' But, uhhh, isn't that execution? Scott's international perspective is a breath of fresh air. 'Yes. So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?' Heh."

Comments

EDA Transition from Sun to Linux

[dprice]

Where I work, we just sold several Sun servers at a fraction of what we bought them for, and we used some of that money to buy a dual Xeon box for running Linux. We run Electonic Design Automation (EDA) applications, and we find that they run faster on Linux, and transitioning our design environments to Linux has been fairly painless. The system uptimes are comparable, and the total cost of ownership is lower with Linux. The faster runtime on Linux also lets us get more out of the EDA software licenses that we purchase. About 4 years ago, Microsoft tried to push its way into the EDA market, but that flopped because most of the existing applications ran on UNIX-type OSes, so the transition was too difficult. Now EDA vendors are flocking to Linux at the expense of Sun.

McNealy on Privacy

[Ellen Spertus]

For more on McNealy's anti-privacy advocacy, see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/29/14 32247&mode=thread&tid=158 and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/12/003242 &mode=thread&tid=102. I also like the Doctor Fun cartoon.

Re:McNealy says that SPARC is #1 64-bit architect.

[serviscope_minor]

McNealy said #1 64-Bit architecture. Comparing its sales volume to the x86 is meaningless since that is a 32 bit architecture. The claim that x86 is #1, is also false: ARM is #1 in terms of volumes, by a long way since pretty much every embedded device these days seems to come with some kind of ARM processor.

So which is the #1 64 bit architecture out there? Well, PA-RISC and Alpha are systems which HP is trying to replace with Itaniums. Shame really, they were both very good systems. The Opteron is outselling the Itanium, which is fantastic, except it looks like the Itanium is selling at a rate of about 13000 a year, so neither of the 64-bit ones coming from teh x86 shops are really in the running at the moment. And where's MIPS these days? That leaves SPARC, Power4+ and the PPC970 (too early to tell for that one). Well, the Power4+ seems to perform better than the UltraSPARC, but it only goes up to 32 processors per box, as opposed to 106 for the UltraSPARC III. For quite a lot of applications, large numbers of processors in a box is better than clusters, so these really do offer a lot in terms of performance. I'd expect that those 106 way Sun boxes to have very high scores in the Spec throughput tests.

There's also other measures of quality, such as reliability. IBM has a pretty good reputation for it with the high end products (there was that one story about some ols S/390 which was up for 8 years and only the case was part of the original install), but then again, Sun doesn't have a bad reputation there either. They're both good, and x86 is nowhere near either of them.

So is the SPARC the #1 64 bit architecture out there? Depends on what you mean by #1, but it's certainly a contender for many definitions.