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."

Comments

Fellow co-founder

[grahamsz]

Schwartz is not a co-founder of Sun - He joined the company in 1996!

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/ceo/mgt_schwartz .html

Re:That was fast

[YU Nicks NE Way]

Too bad he said just recently that he was "still chugging" and not planning to resign. Kind of makes him loose some credibility.

Not exactly: the thing which made him "loose some credibility" was a $217M quarterly loss immediately after telling investors that the Sun turnaround was going well.

He should have said "going into the well".

Re:Wow talk about timing -

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Shares were up nearly 9% in after hours trading. Not quite a pat on the back for Mr. McNealy.

Jonathan Schwartz's previous company was awsome

[EMB Numbers]

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.

Re:Massive layoff forthcoming

[winkydink]

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.