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The Comedy of Scott McNealy
Rob writes "News that Sun co-founder and long-serving CEO, Scott McNealy is stepping aside, heaps a
load of pressure on incoming CEO Jonathan Schwartz - he will have to get working on his
anti-Microsoft gags quick-sharp. Aside from Sun's strategy and his execution of it,
McNealy's tenure as CEO will be remembered for his constant Microsoft sniping. CBR
remembers some of his favourite quotes."
Schwartz replaces McNealy: A tough comedy act to follow?
April 25, 2006
News that Sun co-founder and long-serving CEO, Scott McNealy is stepping aside, heaps a load of pressure on incoming CEO Jonathan Schwartz - he will have to get working on his anti-Microsoft gags quick-sharp.
Aside from Sun's strategy and his execution of it, McNealy's tenure as CEO will be remembered for his constant Microsoft sniping. Anyone who saw him speak knows he always had a quiver of anti-Microsoft jokes up his sleeve. "I don't want my kids growing up in a world of control-alt-delete," was one of my favourites, or, "The bear is pretty strong in the computer business ... but we are outrunning the other hikers."
As we reported in our full coverage of McNealy's decision to hand over to Schwartz here, McNealy said that, "When you start a company, you always wonder who you are going to hand it off to. You can't run it forever."
"I wasn't going to hand it off when we were growing too fast," he continued, "I wasn't going to hand if off after the bubble burst. The time is right to do it now. All the demand indicators are strong. For 22 years, I have been running this joint, and I have had a lot of fun with it." He certainly has.
McNealy has been a constant source of amusement in what might otherwise have been a far less interesting sector. He, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, have taken it upon themselves to poke constant fun at Microsoft, and in so doing have helped in their own ways to ensure that consumers have retained that little bit of cynicism about the world's most powerful software company.
In his capacity as CEO McNealy was bright, witty, straight talking, and often with us hacks, more than a little belligerent. Perhaps that's unsurprising - McNealy once said in an interview with CBR that if he had not ended up running an IT company, he would have chosen instead to pass his time thwacking pucks and heads on an ice rink instead. I hear ice hockey is something of a contact sport. At times McNealy got pretty close to turning being a tech firm CEO into a contact sport, too.
I remember one press roundtable in London a couple of years ago, where a journalist from the Financial Times found himself on the wrong end of McNealy's ire. When the journalist asked a question about comments that Sun's channel had made to him about the soundness of Sun's business model, McNealy retorted sharply: "I'm not going to comment on made-up quotes."
Though the journalist insisted the quotes came straight from Sun's own resellers, McNealy snapped, "Like I say, I will not comment on made-up quotes." As us press began to leave the room McNealy again accosted the FT journalist, saying he was furious with his paper's editor for stories that had apparently said that McNealy's remuneration had been the cause of a board-room argument. "We haven't even discussed that - it's just been made up," McNealy said furiously.
Anyway like I say if you want the low-down on McNealy's departure and his replacement, Jonathan Schwartz, simply visit our coverage of the news here. I chose instead to assemble a few of the best Scott McNealy quotes from over the years. I warn you though - he could never have given up his day job to become a comedian. Ice hockey, perhaps.
A selection of the best Scott McNealy quotes:
"When Steve Ballmer calls me wacko, I consider that a compliment."
"The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it."
"Shut down some of the bullshit the government is spending money on and use it to buy all the Microsoft stock. Then put all their intellectual property in the public domain. Free Windows for everyone! Then we could just bronze Gates, turn him into a statue and stick him in front of the Commerce Department."
"Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system
Or, if you'd like some freshly minted Scott:x it_interview/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/25/mcnealy_e
Among other things, he talks about how he tried to avoid being CEO of Sun in the first place. His first attempt at a replacement (Ed Zander) failed too.
Realizing this situation, the top executives said, "Screw performance! Let's just put hordes of poorly performing cores on a chip." So, we get Niagara. Next comes Rock.
Unfortunately for Sun, both AMD and Intel have got the new multi-core religion. Which will run faster? A multicore SPARC or a multicore x86-64? The smart money votes for the latter.
Without the SPARC64 by Fujitsu, there would be no future for SPARC in the server market.
Who says that companies need H-1B engineers? Fujitsu, as a matter of company policy, hires only engineers with Japanese citizenship. SPARC64 was built entirely without foreign engineers and, performance-wise, beats the pants off the UltraSPARC IV, which was built with a team of which nearly 80% is engineers who currently hold or formerly held an H-1B visa.
but thankfully, mirrordotted as well:
d 403e46d594c/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/f7bd9bd6bc4fe74eada0
boy are you lucky that i don't have modpoints on my hands right now.
1ghz ultrasparc III is rather fast and didn't get beaten by amd or intel by a mile when it came out. it's pretty close, and for it's platform design along with the cpu, it's pretty ok.
secondly, if you run 128 threads at the same time, amd and intel will be d.e.a.d. while niagara still kicks around. amd's or intel's dual cores on this will still mean 64 context switches per core while for niagara it would be 4 context switches per core.
smart money votes for the cpu that does the job. if you have a machine that has to handle lots and lots of stuff at the same time, niagara will win while intel and amd are still switching contexts.
ps. you seem to be forgetting about the fact that the memory limitation on regular x86_64's that you can "just buy" is still enormously low compared to the regular sun workstations.
you can't throw your lowmemory applications at the systems and say that damn ultrasparc is slow and x86 is fast, if you run linux on x86_64 with highram enabled, it aint that fast either anymore.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.