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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."
Good riddance and may the Schwartz be with you (ASAP).
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.
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"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."
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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.
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.
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...
.he'd been dead for three years."
In the words of the great Tom Lehrer:
"It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age. .
KFG
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?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
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.
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
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?)
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.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."