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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."
How would Java evolve without Sun to "guide" it. What would Sun certifications mean without Sun there to back it up?
It seems that Sun is being hit hard because there's little money in the vertically scalable hardware as that has been replaced with better solutions for horizontal scalability.
If Sun does go out of business, Java may become fragmented and start losing the solid base it has around it.
The decision to go with Sun at quite a number of companies I've worked at has been based on the fact that Sun is strong, Sun will be around for a while, Sun will continue development and support. Which has all been true for quite some time now.
However, this is definitely one of the weakest points in Sun's lifetime and it may scare away potential enterprise level decision makers into going with Java and Solaris.
My impression of McNealy from hearing him speak was that he was an amazing businessman (he told stories about his job before Sun... at a dog food company) but simply had no connection to the tech. He was a very bright fellow, and he understood technology, but the only extent to which he understood it was he understood how to make money off of it. He didn't understand why the technology was important-- or that is, the only thing he understood to be important about technology was that you could sell it. This sometimes lead to Sun doing things that were wonderful business moves, but more often, it lead to Sun doing things that simply didn't make sense from any perspective.
Johnathan Schwartz definitely understands the technology. I cannot help but wonder if this will produce changes in the way Sun behaves. Sun is doing a lot of things right now that just don't make sense-- selling products that the market doesn't want; selling products that the market does want but putting rediculous restrictions on their functionality or use*; charging out the nose for things every other company gives away for free; giving away for free everything that it would make sense for Sun to charge out the nose for; simultaneously allowing the divergent interests of Sparc, Solaris and Java to hold each other back and get in each other's way. Since I think many of these things were byproducts of McNealy's strange mastery of economics but total ignorance of what the computer market in specific wants, it seems this could change with Schwartz at the tiller. But on the other hand Johnathan Schwartz has been in a position of power within Sun for some time now, and one would expect that if he were going to make an impact on Sun's behavior, he'd have done it already.
How do you suppose Sun's behavior will change after this point?
* 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.
I offer this topic so all threads on it can be put below:
From what I've seen in my past 12 years in IT, Sun has been about 80% on the money. They've succeeded in some wonderful areas and are one of the few companies that can still churn out their CPU architectures despite the best efforts of Motorola, Intel, and AMD to put them out of business. They've developed Java which has been a success as well as OS components like NFS.
Despite all that, the company has really screwed up. I don't think they did a good job advocating Java or buying the mindshare of the development community. Most sys admins would still rather use Linux and all the cool toys it comes with compared to Solaris. Sun is just cool enough that you want to use it, but you'd never recommend it to your friends.
I'll throw out the first salvo: the best thing for Sun at this point would be for Schwartz to step down at the same time. McNealy was a likable guy and he cast Sun in a good light (no pun intended.) Schwartz seems to backpeddle and tends to alienate communities that genuinely want to help the company succeed.
----- obSig
"JAG wasn't the first, and it wasn't the last ill-conceived attempt by Sun to win the desktop war with Microsoft, and McNealy has never been called to account for all the money he wasted on that war -- a war that already a conspicuous victory for Microsoft long before Sun even got involved."
You've got that right. I never understood how Sun was going to make any money from the MS war (other than the antitrust settlement).
Consider Java. Has Sun recovered all the money spent on it? By its very nature it couldn't directly help Sun sell workstations since it was intended to be platform-independent. The only thing that makes sense to me is the idea that they hoped it would be so ubiquitous that they could make millions selling proprietary Java acceleration hardware (They did start development of such hardware).
Then there's McNealy's weird approach to competing. At one point he publicly derided the concept of word processors and Powerpoint type applications. He told the press that he forbid his employees from using them and gave them each a white board and markers. It's as if he had wanted to go into the facial tissue business by telling the press that he wasn't going to allow his employees to use Kleenex and gave them all handkerchiefs.
Then a few years later he buys Open Office and suddenly office applications are no longer a waste of time.
It is still far easier to do Oracle RAC wrong, and end up with a flat performance curve as you add nodes past 8 or so, than to do it right. It's possible to do RAC for some databases right and get reasonably, monotonically increasing performance out to many many nodes, but it's not common yet, or practical if you look at it statistically in terms of how many projects end up having to back it out and go back to large monolithic SMP servers.
Some databases are partitionable and easily splittable among systems without clustering them. Those, it's already cost effecitve to move to large stacks of small servers. But those aren't the typical data models for large commercial databases.
Actually that's a really good way to answer the question. He never actually denied anything, but he definitely made it seem like it was a denial, right up until the truth broke, when in reconsideration it was everything but.
I wonder if a lawyer advised him to say that or if he decided on it himself. I guess it's not stunningly creative or anything, but it's not bad. You got to give him a little bit of credit.
He had me fooled for a few days. (Not that I really follow Sun that closely, so I'm not tough to fool. I just sort of shrugged and said "sure...rumor...whatever.")
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I suspect that Schwartz was the guy who started the Silicon Valley speech idiom of beginning each answer to a technical question with the word "So". For example:
"Hey Johnathan, what is Java?"
"So, Java is this universal programming language..."
Not sure why this is important to me, but I've spent a lot of time in San Jose recently and I've noticed that everyone is talking that way now. To me it comes across as a teensy bit impatient and condescending, if you consider the tone of voice typically used.
Je suis Marxiste, tendance Groucho.
You almost seem to be contradicting yourself.
The magic of something like an E25K has little to do with the speed of each processor and much to do with the overall system design. Things like the sheer number of processors, memory fabric, I/O fabric, hot-swap hardware, hardware level partitioning, etc.
Even 4-way (8 if you assume dual-core) Opteron boxes are limited by a PC-centric architecture.
What Sun should be doing is putting it's enterprise class systems (read: to include mainboard fabric design) experience to work at making Opteron solutions. With Sun's memory fabric experience and so forth, Opteron could really fly.
Indeed that is what I had in mind.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Here is an article about Schwartz and the Lighthouse applications: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/22/suns_macos _x_suite/
.. Jonathan - Schwartz, told us that the source would in all likelihood remain in Sun's morgue."
"Lighthouse had a highly-regarded suite of software including the Quantrix spreadsheet, Diagram! vector graphics package and Concurrence presentation software. The names might mean little to today's Apple users, more's the pity. Apple's Mac OS X is a cosmetically enhanced update of the old NeXT system...
"Little chance," he told us. "We're not really trying to promote Objective-C anymore, much though I loved the products we built. We think this Java thing has some legs to it."
The Lighthouse's memorial site http://lighthouse.ithinksw.com/index.php referenced in the article and on this gnustep page http://cbbrowne.com/info/gnustep.html does not seem to work anymore.
[skip early history of Jobs and Apple]
- Stve Jobs Starts NeXT and releases NeXTstep on NeXT computers
- Jonathan Schwartz starts Lighthouse Design to develop NeXTstep applications
- Lighthouse Design is very successful and Jonathan Schwartz and Steve Jobs frequently share a stage at NeXTWorld convention.
- NeXT can't figure out a buisiness model for selling expensive workstations with great object oriented development tools (NeXTstep)
- Sun and Apple collaborate on Openstep (the successor to NeXTstep)
- Lighthouse Design ships all of their (very cool) applications for Openstep 68K, Openstep Intel, - -Openstep SPARC, HPUX PA-RISC, Solaris-SunOS/SPARC, and Openstep Enterprise for Windows NT.
- NexT can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Openstep)
- Sun forgets about Openstep to pursue Java
- Sun Buys Lighthouse Design and makes Jonathan Schwartz head of Java Applications Group
- Apple Buys NeXT and makes Steve Jobs a consultant
- Apple ships Openstep 4.2 for INTEL and not PPC/Mac!
- Sun Java Applications Group is unable or unwilling to do anything with Lighthouse Design's applications
- Steve Jobs takes over Apple from the inside becomming iCEO and then CEO of Apple
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted several times
- Apple renames Openstep Cocoa, removing a lot of features in the process.
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to COO of Sun
- Apple slowly restores features to Cocoa and adds new things that were never there before
- Sun can't figure out a business model for selling object ware and developer tools (Java)
- Sun can't figure out a business model for selling expensive workstations
- Jonathan Schwartz is promoted to CEO of Sun
Anyone notice similarities in the career arc for these two individuals?
Anyone notice that Apple and Sun both make integrated hardware and software and provide object oriented development platforms ?
The Economist had a damning article on Scott McNealy just a couple of weeks ago.
rmathew.com
McNealy is making dinosaurs in the age of small more intelligent (and wealthier mammals, ie x86).
Actually, between the opensourcing of Solaris, the incorporation of AMD64 as a first-tier platform, and the Niagara chipset, along with the stuff in Solaris 10 that Sun should have had years ago, I'm more interested in Sun now than I've been in at least 5 years. I have a feeling McNealy was dragged kicking and screaming into the recent changes (I mean the man let Sun coast on UltraSPARC II for how long? Long enough for IBM to come from behind from the relatively anemic POWER1 to the POWER4 and clean Sun's price/perfomance clock), and if Sun's getting traction it's due to Mr. Schwartz's initiatives and this is the legitimate result.
If Sun doesn't haemorrage money and people during this transition, I've got more confidence in them now than I did when you could buy all the SPARC you needed off dotcom eBay auctions.