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:Fellow co-founder

[fm6]

If you want to get technical, neither is McNealy. He was one of the first people recruited by Khosla and Bechtolsheim, but he had nothing to do with the initial creation of the company.

Schwartz actually did found a company: Lighthouse Design, a NextStep application developer that Sun bought out in 1996, and turned into the core of their Java Applications Group, which was supposed to develop applications for those Java-based network computers that were going to put Microsoft out of business.

What's always bugged me is that McNealy spent a ton of money to acquire LD and the other companies that got folded into JAG — all of which was wasted, because it soon became obvious that nobody was going to buy network computers, and there was no reason to keep JAG going. 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.

Instead, McNealy is being forced out for failing to sell high-end computers at a time when nobody's buying them. Wall Street is stupid.

Tomorrow's News Flash: Oracle buys Sun

[filesiteguy]

Knowing that Scott was his only barrier to TWD (Total World Domination) apart from Bill The Gates, Larry Ellison seizes the moment to purchase the once-vaunted Stanford University Network for an undisclosed sum and a few cases of Jolt Cola.

Scott, meanwhile, is rumored to be now working as "technology consultant" for the .NET division of Microsoft as "C# evangelist."

Re:Tomorrow's News Flash: Oracle buys Sun

[__aaclcg7560]

Scott, meanwhile, is rumored to be now working as "technology consultant" for the .NET division of Microsoft as "C# evangelist."

Someone has to teach all those C# programmers the ins and outs of Java.

Hey Scott

[Anonymous Coward]

Good riddance and may the Schwartz be with you (ASAP).

Rumors from a few days ago were true

[kbahey]

I am surprised the editors did not link to this rumor that McNealy is stepping down from a few days ago on Slashdot.

Funny McNealy dismissed this as a 22 year old rumor only a few days ago.

That's odd...

[Otter]

Schwartz is a PR genius, and the way he continuously trolls the Linux journalist/zealot community for attention is masterful. But that seems like a strange fit for the CEO position.

At any rate, this should prompt the 30-something crowd here and elsewhere to reflect on just what the hell they've been doing with thir careers while this guy becomes the CEO of Sun...

Re:That's odd...

[kfg]

At any rate, this should prompt the 30-something crowd here and elsewhere to reflect on just what the hell they've been doing with thir careers while this guy becomes the CEO of Sun...

In the words of the great Tom Lehrer:

"It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age. . .he'd been dead for three years."

KFG

Re:That's odd...

[rco3]

Excellent point. Let's see, what have I been doing with the last 18 years of my life... Ooh! Ooh! I've been NOT becoming a suit! I don't have to fucking TOUCH business or management! I can sit back and do engineering and research without having to do any of the bullshit that McNealy and Schwartz have to do.

Do they make more money? Yes. Do I care? Amazingly enough, not so much. Right now I have a roof over my head, food on the table, health insurance, decent transportation, daycare for the munchkin - and approximately 50% of my income is currently in the "disposable" column - meaning unallocated and available for new cars, nicer houses, fantastic stereo systems, huge monitors, etc. Next year, when I go full time, it gets better.

So thanks for pointing out what a difference there is between my position and Schwartz's. He does stuff I don't want to do, and gets paid more than he needs for doing it. I do what I love, and get paid more than I need for doing it. Sounds like I chose the right path. That was your point, right?

Uh oh, poor Jonathan

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

"Since joining Sun in 1996, Jonathan has been a driving force within the Company. His leadership has been instrumental in streamlining Sun's operations, building a solidly competitive product line, securing key acquisitions and major partner relationships and positioning us globally and across industries to reap the benefits of the networked marketplace," said McNealy.

That much PR bullshit barfed in one statement tells me the actual translation is:

"I leave this company in a mess. Jonathan is the one in deep doodoo now, and I'm bloody out here. Farewell sucker."

Re:Rumors from a few days ago were true

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Funny McNealy dismissed this as a 22 year old rumor only a few days ago.

Well it was a 22 year old rumor a few days ago...

Future of Java without Sun?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Future of Java without Sun?

[hrvatska]

How would Java evolve without Sun to "guide" it. What would Sun certifications mean without Sun there to back it up?

IBM and a passel of other organizations who have based their application strategies on Java would put together an open source consortium that would support and guide Java. Something along the lines of the Eclipse or Apache foundations.

Re:Future of Java without Sun?

[winkydink]

uh... Stanford University Network?

Re:Future of Java without Sun?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Hell, if M$ bought Java from SUN, we'd probably end up with better APIs.
I doubt it. Microsoft has had a couple of bold attempts to kill java, why would it better it?
It shipped JVM 1.1 with extensions, so that it really wasn't a compliant JVM. That left sun with the choice of either 1) accepting the changes, and having it controlled by MS, or 2) fighting them, leaving the Windows platform with an older JVM, and Bill G a "look we tried but Sun is so unreasonable" mood. They chose #2. Sucks for the people who are still saddled with a 1.1 JVM, most people wouldn't know to upgrade, and think that any suckitude is due to Java, not MS's hacking of it. I for one am saddled with not one but two apps that require JVM 1.1 and are they ever slow.

Even that wasn't enough, MS created C# as a Java killer. Think of it as Java as if the initial version was 1.4, already had learned the failures of the previous editions. They were able to learn from Sun's early mistakes. And you can also bust out of the VM when you want to, to tie you to Windows more tightly.

MS wants to destroy anything that it feels can destroy Windows. ANything that can be a platform that doesn't force you to use Windows is a threat. If it were possible to "buy" Java (and i'm not sure of the status of the JCP) they'd tightly tie it to windows, and make things not quite work right elsewhere.

And the M$ thing is old. Microsoft is a for-profit corporation. It is not the only for-profit company. Unless you feel the need to add $ to every company (do i hear $un anyone, Ci$co? $u$e?) it seems kind of pointless. Yes they have been convicted in a court of law for dirty tricks, but they are not the only one. There may be more use in targetting companies that actively kill people or foster repressive regimes ($hell Oil?)

Re:Future of Java without Sun?

[Decaff]

No! That would kill Java.

Not necessarily. What matters is that distributions pass the compatibility tests. There is nothing to stop open source versions passing these tests.

Re:Future of Java without Sun?

[javacowboy]

How did we go from McNealy leaving Sun to Sun going out of business and Java being "abandoned". Do I sense wishful thinking on your part? And you get moded "insightful"?

How did you infer that Sun was going out of business? They're not consistently profitable, but they're not bleeding red ink either. The company also has healthy cash reserves.

As for Java, the spec is wide open for anybody to implement, which the Apache Harmony project is in the process of doing. Sun may head the JCP, but other companies like IBM, Oracle, and BAE would pick up the slack, as they have too much invested in Java to abandon it.

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".

Massive layoff forthcoming

[winkydink]

McNealy was resistant to a massive layoffs (25-35%), which analysts say are the only way to revamp Sun at this point.

More importantly, revamp as what? Big iron only?

I dunno

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.

Re:Massive layoff forthcoming

[jadavis]

It's sad that Sun is looking at so much financial trouble right now (assuming they actually are, and it might not actually be that bad). Solaris 10 is really quite amazing software, and their chip designs look very promising. I think it would take Linux/FreeBSD a long time to catch up to some of the things in Solaris 10 like ZFS and DTrace.

I'm really pretty new to Solaris, however as soon as I started using it I could tell that they did real research on the kernel. I was very impressed after using Linux/FreeBSD for a long time. I can't think of any other companies actually doing that kind of research still. IBM does a lot of Linux development, but I sometimes get the feeling it's more to just make Linux into an AIX replacement (not that I know much about AIX).

Re:Massive layoff forthcoming

[Kadin2048]

Unless, of course, they fire the wrong people.

I've worked for a few big companies, and I can tell you with certainty that at any given time, AT LEAST 10% of the people working there were dead weight and could be eliminated.

But that's like saying, 3% of people in society are criminals. Okay, fine; but knowing that doesn't make picking the right ones any easier. You can't just decide to go out on Tuesday and round them all up.

You can spend the rest of your life (and a whole lot of people have) trying to find ways of figuring out which 10% or whatever are the unproductive ones. Occasionally, it's obvious. But more often, it's quite subtle; someone who looks unproductive on the surface might be just the person you need occasionally -- like some of the old-guard guys in my office: they don't do much but sit around and eat donuts 90% of the time, but when you need a piece of information, you know where to go to. And in that other 10% of the time, they make well up for their donut-munching. Likewise, there are interns and brand new hires who slave away constantly from 7:30AM to 6:30PM in some cases, but what they're working on is often not the most useful stuff around. (Of course, they're cheap, so they stay hired regardless.)

Firing people is like playing a game of russian roulette, but instead of just playing for your own brains, you're playing for a whole lot of people's jobs, futures, careers, and fortunes. I'd much rather keep around a few extra people than pull the trigger on someone that turns out, in some subtle and unforseen way, to be crucial to daily operations. Human social networks are a complex thing, and that's what you're really dealing with in "management." (Of course, only a few percentage of managers--usually the best ones in my experience--realize this.)

Didn't see that coming.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Didn't see that coming.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, the SunRay server also runs on Linux (SuSE and RHAT): http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/

Re:Didn't see that coming.

[aphaenogaster]

And I personally set up and have used sunrays running on fedora with crossover office for endnote, office, and dreamweaver. With the SGD bit, now it appears that the windows barrier no longer exists. Of course now I just use vi, perl, and have a dual processor sparc box under my desk running solaris 10 with windows 2000 running on a sunpci card. The only reason I wouldnt want solaris closer to my desktop is the fan noise.

Re:Didn't see that coming.

[ch-chuck]

his job before Sun... at a dog food company

I wonder if they ate their own dog food?

Re:Didn't see that coming.

[An dochasac]

* 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).

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.

What does Sun need to do to succeed?

[vinn]

I offer this topic so all threads on it can be put below:

• What does Sun need to do to succeed?

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.

Re:What does Sun need to do to succeed?

[Decaff]

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.

Eh? Have you any idea of the size of the Java development community?

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.

Executives and Engineers

[kbahey]

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.

Some of the lousiest managers and executives are techies. This is not to say that every techie is lousy manager/executive, but rather that it does not go automatically that a good engineer would be a good manager.

Some of the best executives for tech companies were non techies. Look at who turned around IBM from another dinosaur to be to what it is today: a tech capable respected company that is kinder and gentler: Lou Gerstner came from non other than Nabisco...

Re:Need big change?

[georgewilliamherbert]

Not really, you still need big honking multi-processor machines to run big honking databases. A quad-proc dual-core opteron still isn't there yet in being able to match a fully loaded E25K for chewing on a big database.

More importantly, a rack full of quad-proc dual-core opterons still isn't there yet in being able to match a fully loaded E25K for chewing on a big database. Ten racks full of them, and a room full of them, either, unless you can partition the database efficiently.

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.

And in other news...

[Ingolfke]

save the date, August 26th 2006, for he McNeally-Fiorina wedding.

Re:Day Late and a few Billion Dollars Short

[Alioth]

If Apple is also a failure and being beat upon by Gates like a rented mule...then give me some of that failure! It must be wonderful to be beat like a mule and to be an utter failure, after all, your stock price quadruples over the period of a couple of years. I think more of us can do with failure like that!