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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."
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Steve Jobs made a similar crack when someone asked him to compare Apple to other computer makers like Dell and Compaq. He said something to the effect of, "Dell and Compaq are part of the distribution chain for Intel and Microsoft, like CompUSA is. They're not computer manufacturers like Apple or Sun."
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What's the deal with this article summary? Some random person comments on his comments? Only slightly better than an editor doing it.
/. is a bunch of random dudes selecting articles from thousands such articles submitted by thousands of other random anonymous dudes. What do you expect? If you want impartial news, listen to Fox.
Nobody said Slashdot had quality editorials :
This said, I agree: this particular article is exceedingly painful to read.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I thought it was a great article. You can read inbetween the lines a bit and see the humor in many of his comments.
He's a CEO, not a governor in-the-running. I think his answers were suprisingly candid...and made for a good over read.
Colossians 2:8
I could have done without the editorial.
I'm surprised you didn't mention other thoughts in your head, like whether or not you like twinkies.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
And I forgot to mention... when EDA vendors come to visit to show you their latest software, they bring a laptop running Linux, and they give you a demo right then and there. In the past, they could just show you some slides, and then they would have to convince you to load a trial copy of their software on your Sun server. One often doesn't have the time and resources to bother installing every new version of software from every vendor that visits. The flexibility of the Linux solution is unmatched by Sun.
This is an age old marketing issue in the computer industry. Here's my take on it.
A "solution" is, well, something that actually satisifies all the customer's needs. Also known as a "system".
A "product" is something that a customer buys with a defined feature set and just does what the seller says that it does. Also known as a "box".
In McNealy's view of Sun's market, there are two ways to set up a data center or a big web site or whatever he's calling his market these days:
(1) Buy a "solution" from Sun which comes with hardware, software, service agreements, and a damn big price tag. Single-vendor integration all the way.
(2) Buy a bunch of "products" like x86 hardware + a Linux distro + a database and then hire some people to put it all together with in-house support. For example, Google.
What McNealy does not get about open source is that it lets us work on the "products" (kernel, gcc, apache, et cetera) and still let companies sell the integrated "solutions" (like IBM and Red Hat enterprise support). Sun's competition is not Dell; it is other complete "solution providers".
This whole argument is obscured by the fact that most people's experience with computers (including mine) is with personal computers; and for personal computers, Dell, Compaq, et al, do sell complete solutions.
Personally, now that the tools are on Linux I much prefer conducting workshops on a handful of Linux laptops over giving passive demos "at" customers. It's more hands-on and realistic. There's also no side-stepping new bugs; it helps exercise all the capabilities in context. :-)
Expect to see more of that "buy a car, not it's parts" metaphor that Scott used...
--The more you know, the less you know.
The result of this growing disparity between the haves and have nots. I mean everyone acknowledges that brain drain happens because the conditions in some other country are much better than conditions in one's home country, which used to be the case in India up until 90s, but now I think the process has slowed. I know that there are a lot of slashdotters who oppose Indians taking their jobs, but the point is that this is the only area where Indians were able to compete with US, in the face of such a huge disparity. Did you know that US pays a 3 Billion dollars subsidy to its cotton farmers every year. And do you know the number of cotton farmers in US? 25000. Which means a subsidy of 120,000 USD per farmer per year, enough to hire two software engineers. These farmers then compete with farmers of countries like India in the international market whose per capita income is 500 USD per year . That is the irony of the situation that these poaching practices killed almost all the industries of the developing countries, and now the only capital they are left with is their people. (India used to be the biggest producer of cotton once upon a time btw). So now we are seeing them fighting back with the only resource they have. How come slashdotters can make societies to ban H1Bs but can't make societies to ask their sentors to cut down the subsidies being given to already rich farmers and maybe invest this money to make education cheaper or start some other development activity? That is the tragedy of US, that every economist says these policies are bad, every senator knows that as well, but majority of the people are not aware because it doesn't affect them directly. All I am saying is don't fight what you see in front. Spare some thought for the causes behind the problem as well.
What's under yellowstone?
I modded you insightful because I believe most of what you have to say is dead-on. But I had to log out and come back as an AC to make one point -
I disagree that the number of people coming in with decent paying jobs already guaranteed should be limited. I believe we should put no limit at all on the numbers, if they have minimum incomes that are higher than say, 80% of the population in the region of employment. That reduces downward pressure on wages and make sure that the immigrants are paying a good chunk in taxes for local services. I also want them to have mandatory citizenship -- in order to take one of these jobs they *must* be on the citizenship track and it must be short, only 2-3 years max and if they don't take citizenship, they get booted. None of this H1B stuff where after 6 years they get sent home because that is a reverse brain-drain that takes our jobs coming in and then exports the work back to the now very experienced people living offshore.
America the beautiful, "Send us your best and your brightest and we'll keep them." Because, long-term, intellectual imperialism is the only way we as a country can effectively stay top-dog. Unfortunately, immigration policies, like H1B, for the last 20-30 years have done enough to undermine our lead in brain-power that we probably won't recover. We are arguably still 1st, but the trend is definitely downward.
Well reasoned arguments, but the premises, like the terminology used, are vague and nebulous. Put another way, I don't buy your arguments.
People don't buy solutions. They're marketed solutions. Which is nicer and very modern way of saying "they're sold a sales pitch."
I've never bought anything from Dell or Compaq, but if I did, I would know that, unlike the vast majority of their customers, I would be buying a Wintel machine assembled by that company. And to the extent that Wintel machine included any proprietary components, I would know they're as authentic as my local supermarket brand of razor blades.
It's sort of like produce. You see and hear "Vons is value" and the salad on your dinner table may have been marketed to you as a "solution," but it's really just lettuce grown nearby and picked by migrant workers.
What Compaq ever did that was so great, I have no idea.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I think the point both Jobs and McNealy were making (probably tongue in cheek in both cases) is that nobody at Dell is concerned about what a "computer" ought to be. They have been phenomenally succesful at transforming parts from a variety of suppliers into computers on people's desks, but their innovation is almost entirely in different fronts of operations management. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Apple and Sun, and Alienware, for that matter, define the nature of what they sell in a way that Dell doesn't.
And this leads to an obvious question. Dell is able to sell products that meet millions of customers needs. They certainly sell more computers than Apple and they certainly beat Sun on desktops. So what is the innovation that Apple and Sun are bringing to the table? After all, with almost no R&D, Dell is able to sell a highly competitive product at a lower cost. I don't think there are too many Dell customers who thought they were settling for less.
I think the answer's more obvious for Sun in the monsterous machine catagory. But even that is looking rough as x86 scales up and out.
Not for nothing, but a customer who wants to buy their "line-up"?
Sun was great in its time, but their value proposition is rapidly vanishing. If McNeally spent more time running the company and less time honing his zingers, he would have a growing business instead of a shrinking one.
That's what happened to my family. My grandparents (and their ancestors too) were farmers in India, but globalization of their crops caused cheaper substitutes from Southeast Asia and America to undercut their way of life. They had no choice but to make sure their children became educated, since it was the only way out of their shitholes. And those educated children came to high paying jobs in America.
So the moral of the story is, keep on learning or become jobless.
I'm not sure your post even qualifies as rational.
First of all, in your 2nd paragraph: yes, the American worker paid for the roads. But the H1-B workers don't have a get-out-of-jail-free card with respect to taxes. They pay just as much as native workers.
Next, it has not been my observation over the last 14 years of working in the industry that H1-B workers are being paid less than native workers. I'm sure it's true in a few cases, but if it were true overall, salaries in those jobs would be declining, not increasing, right? Factor in all the additional cost to an employer to hire an H1-B employee, or get them a green card, and they are MORE expensive, not LESS!
It is orders of magnitude better to have the employee here in the US as an H1-B than have the job float overseas by itself.
McNealy is ignorant of his own company's practices.
Patton said it best "Good tactics can save even the worst strategy. Bad tactics will destroy even the best strategy."
Business plan = Strategy
Execution = Tactics
The dot com's failed because they were mostly formed out of greed by untalented opportunists with an eye on getting rich.
Scott cares more about creating something real, products, employment, and true technology... something to which we geeks should show a little homage.
So if you are going to start a company, it's not your business plan that's going to save your ass. It's the people with whom you surround yourself, the quality, dedicated, morally straight folks that care about the business and its success.
Besides you're going to throw out your business plan in the first year anyway.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
I'm surprised by the vehemence of the posts regarding my commentary. I've been reading /. for years. I really did think the first post was supposed to be provocative. It must be my autism. Point taken. In the unlikely event I have something to post in the future, I'll put any commentary where it can be moderated.
Obviously Sun has accomplished a lot. It's an extremely successful business. DEC was another extremely successful business. 'Staying power' may not be important, or even desireable in today's economy.
Still, it's sad to see how people as capable as Scott McNealy can be so preoccupied with hubris. In the interview he says, 'We need to be more aligned in terms of skill sets and we've got that with the new team. We've got exactly who I wanted in there to run the joint.' That's nice, but the shareholders may not want 'yes men' and 'yes women'.
Cheers!
They aren't so similar now and they are unlikely to become more alike. For one huge thing, IBM has developed a profitable services division over the past decade (that's the big reason they confounded the predictions of their death). Just when is Sun going to start trying to get into that market? Good luck to them now that Big Blue has a ten-year headstart. Also, IBM's sales force is designed to present a range of products and services, so it can bring the choices it offers to bear in a way that Sun does not. On top of that, it makes money whether the customer uses AIX (or IBM heavy metal) or not. Still, IBM is a big, bloated bureaucracy that does a lot wrong. If Sun wanted to, they might still be able to carve a new niche.
To be honest, I'm not sure where Sun figures its role will be in the future market. It seems like they aren't too sure themselves. They should probably concetrate a bit more on planning rather than just the execution...
Amen, brother. I'm a white-anglo-saxon-US-citizen, and I think those subsidies are disgusting (btw, I heard they were $4bn!). They make my skin crawl every time I see those "Fabric of our lives" commercials on TV (I don't know if you live in the US, but we regularly see high-production-value ads from the cotton industry on prime time TV -- as if those actually make people buy more cotton shirts!).
At any rate, it's the worst form of protectionism, and it comes even more directly on the back of the US taxpayer than the H1-B thing that people are complaining about here.
Some USians here forget something very important: the US education system sucks.
/.ers would become reality and a dumb goverment (this one for example) would close the doors. But better not, if the US economy takes a real hit (not the mild recession we are experiencing) populist protectionism would run amock...
Yes, the US has some impressive institutions, leaders in the world. But all the others are pure mediocrity (and the syteme of majors and minors in University is a waste).
Educated foreign workers are required in the US because you don't have enough talented people and luckily for your economy and your society, your companies are willing to stand the quasi racist, protectionist barking in order to bring those workers to the US.
I have worked all around the world, consistently the brightest people from India, Vietnam, Venezuela or Nigeria perform better than most US educated people in a mediocre system, many jobs in the US would go unfilled if this people was not allowed to enter the US.
I whish the wish of so many USian
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You've never used a Sun Ray, have you? It snags your entire display and environment, without disturbing it in any way, no matter where it's pointing, and puts it where you are, no matter where that happens to be.
rsync moves files -- it synchronizes 2 file systems (or directories) that are separated logically or geographically. You can't compare this to a Sun Ray that automagically makes your exact desktop and env appear anywhere you want it to be in seconds (and it's the same copy, not a duplicate) without copying anything.
Different ballgame. I work with the Sun high-end server group (on a common project, not for them per se) and the Sun guys can pop their ID cards into any ($300 and cheaper, not counting monitor) Ray anywhere (about the size of a cable modem ), including the cafeteria and some bathrooms, and have their desktop environment set up instantly, just as they left it, with full security and access rights.
Please show me how to do this with rsync. I mean really -- not just saving my home dir (which maybe 100GB) on a smartcard and waiting for backup/restore on logout/login.
everything in moderation
I'm not really knowledgable about most of what Sun does, but they have been capitolizing on SCO's FUDfest against Linux, and that kinda leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Litigious bastards
(Disclaimer: I'm not American.)
Why can't American accept 50K instead of 80K? If a foreigner in America can live on it then an American should certainly be able to.
The cost of living in the US has become disproportionately high compared with the rest of the world. People overseas who move to the US often haven't been living in poverty. They simply get huge salaries if they can find work in the US compared with another country.
In New Zealand where I am, for example, which is a perfectly okay OECD country that probably has less poverty and a better health/education system than the USA, an opening developer salary would be on the order of US$17K. It's difficult travelling to the US on that salary (without picking up work on the way), but locally it's not a bad amount to live on.
In a true global trade market, people in the US would be able to move to other places, and vice-versa, where there's work and where the cost of living is cheaper. They would also be able to work for a living there without any silly restrictions imposed by governments. Wages are lower in some places, but that doesn't mean poverty unless the cost of living is high and there are labour movement restrictions.
While the grandparent of this post seem to have a clear view of the difference between a product and a solution, the parent doesn't.
Just because something requires less effort on your part to make it do what you want it to (sliced bread vs flower and yeast) doesn't make it a solution.
With a product, the vendor determines the specifications and you decide if you want it or not. In the case of a solution, you tell the vendor what you want to be done, and they present an array of products which as a system will solve your particular problem.
The solutions are where Sun has ruled, and where IBM is riding Linux into their territory. Dell rules at moving the most units at the least overhead, without a care in the world how they're used. Apple is making a push into the enterprise, it'll be interesting to see what route they attempt.
~Lake
The article, "Experience with H-1Bs?", actually describes a violation of the H-1B laws. Please join with me to contact the Department of Labor. It has a web site with contact information. Please forward the article to the Department of Labor.
What violation is described in the article? Well, the intent of the H-1B laws is to allow companies to hire foreign workers when they cannot find American workers with the right skills. For example, suppose that a job requires a person who can wrote C-language code. If the American company cannot find an American who can write C-language code, then the American company may hire a foreign worker via an H-1B visa.
However, the H-1B laws do not allow the following situation. Suppose that the American company actually finds an American who can write C-language code. Yet, the company knows of a foreign worker who can write even better C-language code. So, the company then hires the foreign worker.
Unethical American companies exploit the H-1B laws in order to give them access to the entire world's labor market -- from the very beginning of the hiring cycle. Then, these unethical American companies proceed to hire the best talent in the world's labor market. Do the H-1B laws allow this kind of exploitation. No. Absolutely not.
The H-1B laws require American companies to access only the American labor market. If, at the end of the hiring cycle, they cannot find someone with the needed skills, then they can access the world's labor market.
Please join with me to report possible labor violations at Google and IBM to the Department of Labor. If the author of the article is telling the truth, then we must also report this story to IBM's department of human resources. IBM will likely fire the person who was author's manager when the author was employed at IBM. IBM discourages the use of H-1B workers unless the position requires a Ph.D.