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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."
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 was built on their technology too." "It's the good guys versus the bad guys, and the good guys are winning." "W2K (Windows 2000) will be a bigger disaster than Y2K." "A giant hairball." [About Windows NT] "The Evil Empire." [guess who] "The beast from Redmond." [yup] "Anyone heard any good monopolist jokes lately?" "Ballmer and Butthead" [Ballmer and you-know-who] ".Not, .Not Yet and .Nut" [Microsoft's .Net strategy]
While I suspect that Sun will likely make everything run as usual for at least a little while, at least we knew that with Management's full attention on calling Microsoft bad names, it at least insured that they wouldn't get any bright ideas ab't increasing sagging revenue by screwing with Java and/or all versions of OO.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
While the constant MS bashing was interesting, I think it worked against Sun, and not for it. It sent the message "Buy Sun if you hate Microsoft." Like it or not, hating MSFT isn't a great way to run a billion dollar business.
Do I get more rich and more happy just because I hate MSFT? No. I get more rich and more happy by making better choices that ingore (or include) MSFT as warrented.
Red Hat gets this. McNealy should have sent the message "Buy Sun to solve problems X and Y and Z. That will put more money in your pocket and make you happier." Unless the Schwartz gets this, Sun will continue it's relative decline.
At the press conference where he wore the penguin suit, Scott took off the head to give his speech, and an aide rushed up to grab it and take it offstage. But Scott insisted that the head be left perched up on top of one of the props behind him. "I kind of like the way it looks up there", he said dreamily, almost as if it were on a pike.
It was pretty clear then that he really hadn't come to terms with Linux yet, almost as awkard as his famous "Mo-Mo-(slap)-Motif" moment years earlier.
Nooface
In Search of the Post-PC Interface
New definition of 'open source', accidental leak, or does the person not have a clue what they are talking about?
Sun that is ... there someone had to say it, sorry
but thankfully, mirrordotted as well:
d 403e46d594c/index.html
http://mirrordot.org/stories/f7bd9bd6bc4fe74eada0
Scott McNealy is a White Dwarf.
--Why did you say that?
Because he was totally burnt out at SUN.
--You cannot B-Sirius!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
it at least insured that they wouldn't get any bright ideas ab't increasing sagging revenue by screwing with Java and/or all versions of OO.
There is no money in Java and not much future in Sun's other technologies. I posted this elseswere yesterday but it bears repeating. My advice to Schwartz is the following. Don't try to beat either Linux or Microsoft at their games. You will lose. I suggest instead that you do something that will take the rest of the industry completely by surprise. Invest your remaining resources and passion into the next big thing, the one thing that will solve the nastiest problem in the computer industry today: unreliability. Put all your money in non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software. It will revolutionize both the hardware and the software industry and usher in the most dramatic change in computing since the days of Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace. Don't say you weren't warned. ahahaha...
Why Software Is Bad and What We Can Do to Fix It:
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.
Honestly, I think I'm putting way too much thought into this, but... assuming you did own English, think about marketing it like software!
You could have upgrades for every new generation of people... "Get all the new slang you hear from the young'uns! Only $149.95 with proof of purchase of a previous English Language Pack(tm)! (Upgrading from Olde English does not qualify)"
Or you might have it based on a subscription model. "$49.99 per year entitles you to unlimited upgrades, so you can learn the new technobabble as soon as it leaves Silicon Valley!"
Competitive upgrades! "Migrate from your existing language for the special promotional offer of $169.99! Act now and you'll receive the free Rhymes plug-in!"
Of course it would come in a suite: Comprehension, Speech and Writing as separate (but interoperable) modules. (If MS owned it, each module would come in 7 different 'flavors', which incorporated a highly complex mix of regional dialects and education levels. I fear the Corporate version, to be honest.)
Heh. English On-Demand. Now there's a possibility.
That got bought by Sun awhile ago, I'd hope that he remembers something about innovating. I'd also like to think that he remembers the tech that Sun bought when they bought 'his' company and burried. Probably not too relevant now, but the NeXTStep apps were best of breed at the time, and ran well on 25MHz machines. Perhaps Java could take some direction?
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I am posting this as AC for obvious reasons. At work at Dell at our corporate headquarters. Several months ago, there was a plane circling our buildings all day pulling a banner that was announcing to us that Sun had released new servers. I don't know what it cost to create the banner and then have some guy fly around with it all day, but I'm pretty sure that advertising their product to us was not a good use of capitol. In fact, it felt kind of like a childish "nyah nyah nyah" sort of thing. All in all, I found it very strange, and I found myself glad that I wasn't a Sun shareholder.
Why exactly are we fondly remembering this guy? Everyone seems to be forgetting that one of his more notorious quotes was, "Privacy is dead; get over it." Rather than try to fix privacy problems, McNealy argued that we should just accept it, move on, and embrace the new privacy-less future (especially if it involves systems powered by Sun hardware).
Don't forget that in the wake of September 11th, both him and Ellison were ponying up to offer their company's services in helping to create a national ID. He even calls lining up at airport security an "efficiency tax" that biometric IDs would somehow maaaaagically fix.
I say good riddance.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Whether it is Microsoft or even the Devil himself, spending the majority of your speeches and company focus on fighting another company instead of bolstering your own company and strenghtening your own products is a bad business model.
You don't see Burger King announce a new burger and tell you that it is ok and the best feature it didn't come from McDonalds...
Maybe if he would have had the same obsession for this company that he did Microsoft, Sun might be stronger on the desktop and not losing server marketshare.
McNealy's funniest quote is probably the following one from a 1996 Red Herring article. His letter to the editor is even funnier.
NORTHWEST PASSAGE: Microsoft's plans to navigate the Java waters. August 1, 1996
"Microsoft is on the offensive again because its hegemony is threatened by Java's potential to obsolete Windows and Microsoft Office. This is not only financially threatening, but seen as a personal insult. Sun CEO Scott McNealy ceaselessly goads developers to adopt Java and overthrow what he bluntly calls Redmond's mediocre standards of quality--'Windows 95 is just dogshit with whipped cream on top.'"
LETTER TO THE EDITOR. December 1, 1996
McNealy euphemizes
I enjoyed Jonathan Burke's article "Northwest Passage." Mr. Burke did a fine job of laying out the reasons that software developers are pushing for a multiplatform Internet and how this poses a threat to Microsoft.
However, I was shocked, puzzled, and offended when I came to a passage in the story that seriously misquoted me referring to Windows 95 as "[expletive] with whipped cream on top." As chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems, a $7 billion publicly held company, I am very aware that my shareholders and the public take a dim view of crude, unprofessional language from executives. I make it a rule never to curse in public. I don't do it. I would never do it. I didn't do it with Mr. Burke or anyone else. In fact, in a carefully worded and deliberately inoffensive manner, I called Win 95 "whipped cream on a road apple."
Scott G. McNealy
President and CEO
Sun Microsystems
The Herring Responds
Ah, "a road apple"--that's much more genteel.
While working as an intern at Sun, heard this one from the man, regarding the merger between HP and Compaq:
"It's a slow motion collision between two garbage trucks."
And regarding HP's decision to pull out of some market or other (can't quite remember which one, sadly):
"All that's left is us, Big Blue, and the Convicts".
just an analog boy living in a digital age.
You state that hardware is more reliable than software because hardware is non-algorithmic and synchronous. This does not seem to be correct.
Hardware is typically more reliable than software for the following reasons:
1) Patching hardware is very difficult and expensive, so they get it right the first time. Patching software is cheap and easy, so they don't worry as much.
2) Harwdare does have errors, have you ever looked at the errata sheets for CPU's?
3) Hardware typically has a more limited set of functions than software, software combines those limited functions into increasingly large sequences resulting in a much larger state space, which in turn requires more testing.
You state that the brain is reliable because it is signal based and synchronous. This is not the reason the brain is reliable (the brain is asynchronous, not synchronous). The brain is reliable because it employs a mathematical model that matches input to closest previous match from experience. It will always choose an output, although the output will only be as good as experience and training.
It was difficult on that page to see a concrete argument showing how a UBM improves reliability, other than the stated analogies. If I have missed a key point as to why a UBM has advantages, I would be interested in knowing what those reasons are.