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

sun

[Anonymous Coward]

do we like or hate sun this week?

Who's the poster anyway?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

'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,

Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish. No need for retarded hitmen analogies ...

Not a hit-man, a football coach

[The Monster]

I care more about execution than I did in the old days. In the old days, vision was really important. Today, you've got to have execution with vision.

This is the same thing you hear from football coaches when people talk about the plays the call. Instead of admitting they called the wrong play, they want to talk about how the play was executed. Far more important to me was this:

Obviously, Microsoft is not operating on market discipline or they couldn't raise their prices with declining unit volumes in the face of post-bubble. They couldn't bundle the houseboat with the sport utility vehicle like they do with Windows and Office.

That's the only thing we need to worry about. All the rest is simple -- everybody trying to make their own case.

He's saying that Microsoft isn't evil because they write crappy software; they're evil because they aren't being punished by the market for it.

well, I read the whole article

[Anonymous Coward]

and got done and there were still no +1 comments.

He sounds a little defensive, but that's understandable. He's been beat up over the last couple of years. Everyone's saying no-one needs Sun and it's a dinosaur. "All the talented people are leaving the company".

But they have over $5 billion in the bank and their line-up is really second to none. Dell can't match their highly tailored line-up. They've got a killer community in java and tons of other stuff coming out.

Sun's still useful for some things, and they got cash to burn. They have a marketplace and they have a line-up. What more do you want?

Dell and computers

[Otter]

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.

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."

The Indian Brain Drain.

[GillBates0]

So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?' Heh."

The Indian government has been concerned about the "brain drain" since 1990 or so. Atleast that's around the time they started acknowledging the fact that it was a serious problem.

The government puts in a lot of money into the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Regional Engineering Colleges. Tuition fees and on-campus living expenses are greatly subsidized for students who are admitted to these colleges based on national-level exams (like the IIT-JEE believed to be the toughest exam at it's level in the world).

A large percentage of graduates from these colleges look for higher salaries and better jobs outside of India: in the US and Europe or Asia, and given the huge amount of resources that the government (and tax payers) pumped into their education, it naturally gets the jitters when students choose to work abroad.

The Indian government has lately taken to giving pep talks in colleges, in addition to distributing booklets explaning the effect of brain drain on the local economy.

I think brain-drain is essentially an outcome of globalization. Technology, irrespective of where it is developed benefits the world as a whole.

:wq

Sun won't die.

[JusTyler]

I don't believe Sun will die. Claiming they will would be like claiming "IBM is going to die" in 1990. It might have seemed like an intelligent thing to say, but too many background issues ensured it didn't happen.

In fact, Sun and IBM might become a whole lot more similar in the years to come.

Currently they're both companies that have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them. They both have a very large internal focus on research and information management (Sun has its own 'SunLibrary', Google for more information), and both are renowned for developing new technologies which are then "stolen" or "borrowed" by other companies.

Sun and IBM also do a lot of research and provide a lot to disciplines that run alongside their product line. For example, Sun did a lot of work with usability (that's where Jakob Nielsen came from), whereas IBM has done a lot of work on information retrieval and search engines (Google for 'ibm web fountain').

Even if Sun's main market dries up, replaced by Apple XServes and Linux clusters, this will be no more devastating to them as IBM losing out in the x86 market in the late 80's and early 90's.

Sun has a lot of brainpower, a lot of money, and partnerships (Oracle is the latest) to ensure that they'll continue for many years as a research and technology company, if not as a "consumer facing" company.

Why is 'execution' a dot-com expression?

[lushmore]

Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish.

'Execution' is a word executives use to divert blame from themselves. If a company or team is unsuccessful, "poor execution" is the reason, even though a bad or unrealistic business plan may have been at fault.

When an executive says from the beginning that execution is the key, it means the business plan is shaky. If he actually had a good business plan, he would have said something that sounds like "we can't lose."

Re:scott mcnealy

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I thought that particular question was vague and insulting. So I would also like to know, what the hell is an industry standard. Especially concerning enterprise solutions, where Sun, IBM, and HP are the biggest players. I would hardly call x86 an industry standard in that field. He should have asked that question to someone other than McNealy.

Sure, he was a bit defensive in the interview, but then again, which CEO wouldn't be? Did you expect him to say "Sorry, I realize we're fucked in the post-bubble economy"?

$5.7 billion in reserves is a good buffe, for them to change their strategy and get out of the funk.

Leave the stinking rant out of the article

[jensend]

We really didn't need Sequoia's "editorial" cluttering up the news here. People should not be able to have their biased opinions posted as part of the story and thus circumvent the whole comment system and get prominent placement of their views without moderation.

Experience with H1-B's?

[LauraW]

Regardless, American companies, since Reagan and Nixon, have subverted the American immigration laws in order to crush unions and discipline labor [....] But to massively expand the H1-B program just because the richest people in American want to pay less in wages in crazy.

This is a wonderfully naive point of view that seems to be very common on Slashdot. While it might be true in some industries, it makes me think you don't have much experience with H1-B's at the higher levels of the tech industry. So I'm going on a rant....

<rant>
I was a manager at IBM for a couple of years, and in that time I think I hired two or three people on H1-B visas and helped one or two more apply for green cards. (With some overlap between the sets.) This was out of a group of abut a dozen people, so maybe a third of my team was on some sort of visa. The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage.

My group and the others at our site were feeding off the top of the programmer food chain, to borrow an analogy. We needed engineers who knew the ins and outs of Java and/or C++, had a good grasp of OOD, and were able to figure out the details of standards documents and implement them, or even to help write them in the first place. Just as important, we needed people who were smart and could learn new technologies and languages quickly.

People like this were very hard to find at the height of the tech boom here in the Valley. When I was at IBM I and my group did a lot of interviewing, both on the phone and in person. It took up a lot of time. We got resumes from outside recruiters and we got a lot of transfer requests from other parts of the company. Even with all of those resumes, I still couldn't hire people as fast as I wanted to. Sure, there were lots of engineers available, but most of them just weren't that good. Truly talented "star" engineers are rare.

When I found a star, I did what it took to hire them, even if they weren't a US citizen. H1-B paperwork is a royal PITA, as is getting approval from umpteen levels of management. (If you're a really bad person, you come back in the next life as an immigration lawyer.) It also costs a lot of money to sponsor someone for an H1. I think it was around $5,000 when you added up the application fees, lawyer's fees and so on, but I can't remember. Then you have to do the green card a year or so later, and it costs even more and has more paperwork.

We definitely weren't saving money by hiring people on H1-B's. In addition to the legal fees and management time we spent on the visas, we were paying the H1 folks the same salaries we'd pay anyone else. Every few months we'd informally rank all the employees at the site and make sure the salaries lined up with the rankings, with absolutely no concern over visa status. The better, more productive engineers got paid more, period. There were definitely senior engineers who happened to be on H1's who got paid more than more junior (but still bright) engineers without much experience. I didn't see any correlation with visa status, except maybe that I never made any college hires of people on H1's. (It wouldn't have been worth the expense of flying them over here for an interview; the same thing applies to out-of-town junior-level US people.)

Many people think that market conditions have changed in the last few years and that H1s are now mostly obsolete. I think that may be true at some levels of the industry. But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want