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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.'"
INSIDER & RULE 144 TRANSACTIONS REPORTED - LAST TWO YEARS
Date Insider Shares Type Transaction Value*
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chairman 2,400,000 Direct Option Exercise at $3.125 per share. $7,500,000
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chairman 2,400,000 Direct Sale at $4.30 - $4.37 per share. $10,404,0002
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chief Executive Officer 2,400,000 Direct Planned Sale $10,344,0001
Get out while the gettin's good, take the money and run.
Sun is trading at $5 a share, time to buy? or forgeddaboudit!?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Replacing McNealy with Schwartz would be like performing a brain transplant in which a poorly functioning brain is replaced with a kidney.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
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.
I know he isnt popular with the /. crowd, but Schwartz -IS- popular with the Fortune500 CEO crowd... I've seen the guy work a room, he comes across very charismatically (way WAY more than McNealy ever has) and the dumb PHB/CxO types seem to really take an interest in what he's saying.
Now, I'm no fanboy of either one, but McNealy is probably better suited to chair thier R&D or something than he is to being CEO these days. Schwartz at least would put a more energetic face on the company and (one could hope) re-vitalize thier core competancies.
Now, I know im dreaming, but maybe of McNealy got out of the top slot, Sun could/would FINALLY ditch thier 4000% margin policy and start selling crap that I (me personally, or the company I work for) could actually afford to buy!
No, remember SGI just recently shifted to Linux...
jh
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.
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Scott McNealy's days at Sun are numbered 8001 with tomorrow being #8002.
I suggest you actually look at Solaris. There are some amazing capabilities in there way ahead of Linux.
ZFS is a filesystem that can do raid5-like storage or mirrors. Filesystems can share a common storage pool. You can make snapshots instantly, and at any time you want you can roll back to that snapshot (transactions). Everything about it is very cool, check it out.
DTrace is also amazing. You can observe almost anything about a running program with negligable performance impact. It will break the information down for you statistically so you can tell that, for example, 1% of the time a given function call takes 1000 times longer than average.
It's also got containers and zones, and a service manager.
I have been using Linux and FreeBSD for a long time. I am just getting interested in Solaris, and I am very impressed.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
Sun are unlikely to drop Solaris, it is and for the most part always has been their crown jewels.
It would be difficult to find a OS that on a capability by capability approaches Solaris as a server platform. dtrace, SMF, zones, fireengine, great scalability, good enough HCL.
However I can understand a Linux advocate wanting Sun to drop Solaris, it is the closest and best competitor to Linux.
A large number of big commercial companies that were early adopters of Linux are now looking long and hard at Solaris x86. Its fast, cheaper than Linux, OpenSource if they want to tick that box and it runs on pretty much all the hardware that they deployed Linux on.
Some have jumped allready.
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?"
I worked for Sun for 7 years, some of that time at VP level, so I got to know Scott, and work with/for him. He taught me an important lesson: never, ever, give up. There were at least two occasions when I was sent out to fight "hopeless" battles for Sun against the arrayed masses of competition. He pushed hard to not give up in the face of impossible odds, and we won.
He never gives up.
It's very easy to armchair quarterback what Sun and Scott have been doing this past decade or so. Whenever I find myself wondering why my SUNW shares aren't worth a tenth of what I paid for them, I'm tempted to think of how I could run the company better than Scott. And then I realize that my puny mind can't come up with anything. The company generates cash, employs a lot of people and satisfies a lot of customers. Scott's never been afraid to remake the company (I lived through the transition from technical workstations to commercial servers and that was quite something), but there's only so much that you can do.
I have no clue what's going on inside the company now but, of one thing I'm sure: if Scott does step aside, it's because he thinks that it's the best thing for the company. He's given everything to it for over 20 years, and could easily have taken the "go lie on a beach" path years and years ago.
But to play devils advocate for a bit, the free like beer "download editions" for most Linux distros have left a larger market of Linux admins to hire from. We are a mixed shop but most of the "new" guys into out Linux/UNIX deparment tend to prefer Linux becasue that is what they know. Everytime we lose an old Solaris guy, we get a new Linux guy. I don't think the days ahead are going to get any easier for Sun.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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.