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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.
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.