Slashdot Mirror
Sun's Scott McNealy's Days are Numbered?
alek writes "The Wall Street Journal writes 'Dusk could be near for Sun's McNealy' where they conjecture that the founder and and CEO of Sun Microsystems might be leaving soon. They suggest that the return of former CFO Michael Lehman and and a more active Board pressing for improved performance could result in COO Jonathan Schwartz taking over the top job. We've heard stories like this for years but Scott has hung in there for a long time - his response to the WSJ was 'That rumor is about 22 years old and still chuggin.'"
Too bad they can't seem to fully adopt/develop Linux/FOSS software on their hardware instead of flogging Solaris.
Don't get me wrong, Sun has given a lot to OSS but they really need to stop sucking that dry Solaris tit while they slowly starve to death. It looks kinda funny when there is a full Linux teat right next to them and they wont fully embrace it.
Seriously, Ray Ozzie ( of Lotus fame ) has serious power at Microsoft. He is definatly a man of vision, the question is, do you agree with his vision. My understanding is the work he was doing at Groove was quite impressive, plus Microsoft basically bought groove to get this guy on board.
Of all the people listed, I would rather have him running the show.
This article is from Wall Street, nb. What it seems to be saying is that a lot of Wall Street brokers would do very nicely out of a share price rise if Mr McNealy stepped down. Well, they would say that wouldn't they? What the article does not mention at all is a credible strategy to secure Sun's future prosperity, if one can be found. Without that, it doesn't matter whether McNealy, Schwartz or for that matter Donald Duck is at the helm.
Just my 2 cents, but whatever you think of him Scott McNealy is a colourful and entertaining character in an industry of direly grey men. I'd be sorry to see him go, at least until he'd found a new home for Sun as it is hard to see how it can continue on its own for that much longer.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
All it is saying is that he is exercising is option and getting a little extra cash....
Time to buy I think -
SUN have always had their critics - they did well in the dotcom boom, and everyone said that they chose the wrong model before it kicked off.
They have new servers, new chips and an impressive roadmap - I think they have turned a corner.
They've been so obsessed with Microsoft that they failed to see that their biggest threat was IBM. Sun could have easily come in and preempted IBM by making the transition to OpenSolaris sooner, heavily supporting Linux in a real way earlier and making a name for itself in open source sooner. Imagine if they'd started 7-8 years ago with supporting PostgreSQL on their systems and actively developing it into something that was a quality part of their software stack (not saying it's a bad DB). How about if they'd done the official port of Java to Linux, instead of making Blackdown do work on it until Linux became too strong to ignore?
Their leaders are arrogant and resistant to change. That's a bad combination when you're in a competitive field where swallowing your pride and accomodating your users is the most important way of making money.
Sun is a shadow of its former self and it doesn't have to do with McNealy, except to the extent that he could make the rounds and "moticate" people. Personally:
- Tried to call Sun 4 times to get quotes for hardware and support contracts. Did not get hold of a human, phone system made me leave messages each time. No one ever returned my calls.
- All Sun's patches, and their treasure trove of support information, SunSolve, is behind a paid firewall now, and you need to buy a support contract to get access. See item above. Why not just a support subscription I can charge to my credit card. Zillions of people would probably pay $500 per year for that. I would, gladly.
- We bought several of the new X4100 boxes. Nicely designed, but serial console management did not work in Solaris 10 (or else required a fistful of undocumented hacks), and the LOM remote console was buggy and crashed a couple of times, requiring a system power cycle. We sent the servers back.
- It takes me twice as long to build any OSS on Solaris - no one is really developing on it consistently. Ever tried building Firefox on Solaris?
Basically, this is all execution. It's just easier to buy something other than a Sun. If need a Web server, I can have a Linux host installed and up from CDROM in 15 min, 45 min if I care about building the absolute latest version of Apache or an obscure Apache module.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
There is a lot of work going on to make Solaris and Linux work well together. You can use zones to set up linux on a Solaris box, but I'm a little unclear on the details. I'll be checking that out soon though.
I think the porting of ZFS would be reasonable to do, but I'm sure it would take some work.
DTrace seems like it would require a LOT of work. All the work of DTrace was not the userspace application, but all of the hooks added into the OS at every level. So basically it would be repeating all the work on Linux rather than merely a port.
The main thing to take note of is that Sun is actually innovating. There's a lot of actual research being done on the OS kernel itself, which not too many companies are taking seriously. Linux is great, but I don't think it's going to make Solaris obsolete any time soon. There are also some major differences in overall design philosophy.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.