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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.'"
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
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.
Sun is trading at $5 a share, time to buy? or forgeddaboudit!?
:-)
Now's the time to decide--earnings call is on Monday. There are some credible rumors floating around that this will be the first profitable quarter in years. Sun's really revamped their product line in the last 16 months (AMD, Niagara, etc.) and in their last 10-K they mentioned they were actually having a hard time meeting demand. (Apropos the original story, there's also speculation that this would be an ideal note for McNealy to end his career on.)
If they do end up back in the black, every analyst and his brother will be on CNBC Tuesday morning shouting "Turned the corner!" and I think it would cause some major institutional buyers to jump back in. Unlike the run-up last month which got subsequently iced due to profit taking, the big guys would be in it for the long haul, creating a new support. $5.50 or maybe even $6? I haven't done the math.
And I feel like this possiblity hasn't been fully capitalized in to the current price--I'm really surprised how little talk there is about SUNW on the boards, newswires, or the Street. A lot of people seem to have written it off as a sad relic of the dot-com era. I think they're missing out on two key points: 1) how revolutionary and unique these new UltraSparc T1s are, especially for those serving up huge amounts of online content (ie everyone) or who are worried about energy costs (ie everyone), and 2) how much brand equity "Sun Microsystems" carries among a whole generation of 25+ year old geeks who grew up worshipping that awesome UltraSparc workstation in the server room/lab/etc (like everyone at Google, for one.)
To the extent that it's even possible nowadays, I feel like SUNW has been slipping under the radar for the last couple months.
P.S. I am quite obviously long on this stock, so if course it's in my best interest to convince you of all this
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
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.
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.