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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."
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.