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McNealy Steps Down as Sun Microsystems CEO
SlashdotOgre writes "Mercury News reports that Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, will be stepping down from his role as CEO. McNealy will continue as chairman, and fellow co-founder Jonathan Schwartz will now take the helm."
Schwartz is not a co-founder of Sun - He joined the company in 1996!
z .html
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/mgt_schwart
He should have said "going into the well".
Shares were up nearly 9% in after hours trading. Not quite a pat on the back for Mr. McNealy.
Uhh, the SunRay server also runs on Linux (SuSE and RHAT): http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/
Lighthouse Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design
Lighthouse produced awesome NeXTstep/Openstep applications. Recall that Openstep was an open standard cross platform framework provided by NeXT (Steve Jobs) and Sun (Scott McNealy). Little things like the first web browser and content editor, the dev tools for the game Doom, and Lotus Improve originated in NeXTstep. Scott McNealy once famously said Sun puts all of its wood behind one arrow, and Openstep is that arrow. Um, then Java came along and Sun forgot about Openstep.
Sun acquired Lighthouse Design in ~1996. Lighthouse produced Diagram which was imitated in the form of Visio. Lighthouse was rumored to be producing a project management application (think MS Project). Sun initially said they would release the Lighthouse suite of NeXTstep/Openstep applications as Java applications for enterprise users. Sadly, Sun was never released them. Maybe there was no market or Sun wasn't able to get them to work as Java apps.
Openstep went on to become Apple's Cocoa.
Lighthouse's applications dies inside Sun.
Jonathan Schwartz became Sun CEO.
From the San Jose Mercury News article a few days back:
Monday's earnings call ``will provide investors the first opportunity to press both McNealy and Lehman at the same time to see if they are on the same page in terms of the magnitude of any restructuring,'' Sacconaghi wrote. ``A major restructuring move appears to require a shift in CEO McNealy's traditional sentiment regarding head count, which may be difficult to effect or cause a leadership struggle within the company.''
Sacconaghi estimated Sun would need to cut 10,350 to 12,150 jobs -- or 27 percent to 31 percent of its worldwide workforce of about 39,000 -- to reach an acceptable operating margin. But he added, that magnitude ``would be difficult to execute without potentially undermining the business.''
You can find several other articles that say essentially the same thing if you want to hunt for them.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
uh... Stanford University Network?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
* One of many examples: I think a lot of people might be interested in SunRay if it wasn't that its use is still painfully tied to Solaris, which nobody wants to use so much as within 50 feet of a desktop machine.
Sun Ray isn't tied to Solaris. It has been available for linux since 2004. Customers have been running Windows via RDP client, tarantella or citrix for much longer than that. It just takes a while for new technologies to trickle down to joe user and replace cheap, but inefficient technologies. My only complaint is that there is no Sun Ray server version for OSX yet (AFAIK).In the late 90's Scott was quoted that MS Word was Nintendo for adults, and what he meant by that was that MS was putting new bullshit features into word every 18 to 24 months so that they could sell new versions to existing customers, whose employees were just using the new features to do goofy shit with their documents.
Schwartz seems to backpeddle and tends to alienate communities that genuinely want to help the company succeed.
Hey Brian, substantiate this.
It's a business methodology (or philosophy as they call it) used at Sun.
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/sunsigma/
Check out the FAQ section.
My freedom ends where someone else's begins
Do you know why people are writing AJAX applications? It's because Sun failed the promise of java.
No, because Microsoft sabotaged having a quality JVM bundled on the client.
Do you know why there are so few java gui apps? Because Sun failed java.
There aren't few Java GUI apps. This is a common myth. Swing is used by a very large number of developers for internal client-side GUI apps within organisations. One of the most rapidly growing areas of Java is Rich Client development using the built-in resources of IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans.
Do you know why Ruby on Rails exist? Because Sun failed Java.
No, it is because many developers prefer open source development with languages like Ruby. Good for them. It a nice language. However, in terms of commercial impact, Ruby on Rails barely exists.
Java was all full of promise. Cross platform, run from the browser, free yourself from the drudgery of writing stateless apps using http and and that abortion known as javascript, no more learning 15 different gui toolkits, etc.
Well, that works for me. I don't use Javascript. I use Java-based tools like JSF to render it transparently for me.
So yes there are a billion java programmers all writing web apps but it's become a ghetto. Java was destined for bigger things.
Like what? Client side development? It is there. Numerical work? There. Real-time and embedded use? There. Mobile devices? There.
If you actually look at the earnings, you'll see that (a) almost all the loss was "stock-based compensation expenses," which is to say, money that never actually existed, (b) the earnings and revenue were near the center of the ranges expected by investors, and (c) the company was once again cash-flow positive, which means that not only were most of the losses just paper (stock option expensing) but all of them were (depreciation, etc.) and the company actually brought in more revenue from operations than it spent on operating expenses. Most of us outside the accounting world would under those circumstances say we'd made a profit. Put another way, if Sun were running a lemonade stand, it spent $20 on lemons, sugar, cups, and water, made $25 selling lemonade, but was forced to say it lost $1 because 10 years ago it bought Johnny's lemonade stand for $200, and despite being no less serviceable, that purchase is now worth $6 less to its accountants. All corporations have this problem, so you need at least a rudimentary understanding of accounting to make sense of an earnings report. It's nice to show a GAAP profit, but you can have a GAAP loss for years and years and actually have more money in the bank each year.