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McNealy Created Millions of Jobs?
cahiha writes "In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating
'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?"
Al Gore? He created the internet, and there must be at least a million porn sites...
Come on. Jobs is Unique!
something they have not succeeded at so far
They shouldn't have been so restrictive about their license.
What do you mean no java in my debian repo !?
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
but as far as ceo's go he was a cool guy who generally got out of the way and let technologists drive. You know, the dilbert principle. I'd work for scott in a heartbeat. The same can't be said for one of the Steves.
I'm sure SUN's innovations sparked ideas elsewhere in the industry, but that has happened in all industries since the beginning of capitalism. His taking sole credit for the creation of millions of jobs is self-aggrandizing and doesn't deserve anything but a shaking of the head for his narrow-minded conclusions.
So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating 'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?
Neither ?
These black & white choices are annoying >_<
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
This is laughable.
The _only_ reason that millions of jobs were created was because of the roaring success of the Internet accessible to the masses.
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft for making computers easier to use for a vast majority of the population.
Millions of Jobs
:)
Sweet! Maybe I'll move to India to get one!
The real path to male liberation
It wasn't Scott McNealy who is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. That's obviously Al Gore. Schwartz is trying to rewrite history here!
We all know it was Al Gore who invented the internet. And killed Manbearpig.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Closed products can only compete with open projects if they are significantly superior in quality and available on a sufficient number of platforms. While I think Java fills the latter requirement, it does not the former; it is at least on the same level as equivalent products, and perhaps lower than some others. No amount of marketing can change this: if Java is not sufficiently opened, it will remain on the path to obscurity. Without new ideas being able to add to the product, it will decay.
See, with an intel machine, you just need one guy to run it.
:-)
With Sun machines, you need an SC specialist, a OBP specialist, a Solaris specialist, and three guys just to install the damn thing.
I'd say they're creating a hell of a lot of jobs.
Well, I have been hearing that the BSD's are dying too!
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
I think Schwartz has been drinking a little too much of the Sun "coolaid". It kills me how companies after a while become so absorbed into themselves that they can no longer see what is obvious to the rest of us. Sun is going the way of SGI unless they do something drastic. The Intel/AMD on Linux has basically done alway with their niche of the '90s.
... or any other single individual for that matter.
If so, then wouldn't one argue that the Abacuses created billions of jobs? How about the person(s) who invention the wheel -- didn't that create zillions and zillions of jobs?
When well we stop giving needless and total credit to one individual who merely happens to be at the right place at the right time. McNealy would not have been successful if many, and many, and many other individuals didn't do their parts directly or indirectly their part -- they too must be singled out if McNealy is.
-- George
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
so, by this logic, if you fire a visionary CEO, your stock will shoot up.
sorry, jonathan schwartz, but it looks like your days could be numbered.
I would call the statement an exaggeration, however, Sun did deliver lower-cost quality unix systems on which apache, perl, netscape, and other network oriented apps depended. Yes there was AIX, HP-UX and a few others, but Sun delivered quality unix machines to the mass market (ish)..
I would say he gets credit for a good product at a good price point when and where it was needed and that did help the economy.
Who would of thought that keeping all those Windows machines running would take up so much of the Global 'GDP'...
I'm sure Scott would love to be selling some Sun branded hardware as a result of his "vision". Cause I think _THAT_ was really the original idea. That or selling in "set-top" boxes etc... For the most part, they have missed their target market.
I agree with the author's rebuttal to Schwartz (and would also point out the silliness of the premise that McNealy gets credit for anything Sun the company did while he was CEO), but I'll add that Sun did do a lot to fight the mono-culture when it was most threatening and to keep Unix commercially viable for a lot longer than many predicted. It's hard to predict how things would have evolved without that.
I think there is some confusion here. To the best of my knowledge the success of Microsoft and their ability to provide a relatively low cost and consistent client for application development and deployment for applications has had much more of an impact that anything that Sun has developed. Without a client, what good is the network? Take a look at the "network thin client" as an example. Where is it today?
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates. Mock his OS all you want, nobody is perfect. But just take a look around and count the number of jobs directly affected by Microsoft products and compare that to those directly affected by Sun's.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
When (former) CEOs start getting these feelings of grandeur, it's a sure sign of dementia.
How about we give the credit to the US government agencies like DARPA and NASA, who planned and funded most of the computing research projects from which modern computers and networks developed, and not to people who just ran the companies that built some of the machines and created some of the software? It the DOD, NASA, and the intelligence community hadn't been pushing for all those cool networks and powerful computers and bringing together thousands of companies and academics to do the work, companies like Sun probably wouldn't exist at all.
Do You *REALLY* want to know who created millions of jobs?
Linus Torvalds.
I'm sorry, no contest Schwartzy. Your little cottage-industry has created literally squat in the face of the real innovator, and leader of the Free world.
'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy].
Excuse me!???!
Jesus, that guy has a man-crush for McNealy or something. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Just think about all the jobs and companies that exist today because Linus built the OS that could. For Every embedded device that uses Linux, for every company that spits out yet another distribution, every hosting company that uses it--hell, How many people did Microsoft need to hire, just to compete?
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
"While I think Java fills the latter requirement, it does not the former; it is at least on the same level as equivalent products, and perhaps lower than some others."
Opinion as fact. Anyway Javas success has proven that superiority isn't everything it's cracked up to be. There can be said to be plenty of languages that are it's equivalent, if not superior, and yet they're not the ones generating "millions of jobs".
"No amount of marketing can change this: if Java is not sufficiently opened, it will remain on the path to obscurity. Without new ideas being able to add to the product, it will decay."
Unfortunately for your wishful thinking. Ideas are being added. Also as sourceforge has shown. Open-source isn't some magical bullet to success.
...uhhh I can't help but wonder what your msft/Apple rant could possible have to do with McNealy and Sun?
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
MSFT started in the Japaneese market behind Apple's back with Windows 1.0, why do you think there is bad feelings between Gates and Jobs.
McNealy was trying to ride the wave that Microsoft was, at the time, willfully blind to. He showed more vision than Microsoft. But Sun shouldn't get the credit for creating that wave. The Internet had been around for a while, and was going to burst on the commercial and public scene in a big way, thanks to many factors, of which Sun was just a small part. (Microsoft, meanwhile, had their collective heads in the sand, or rather, in their hindquarters, trying to deny that this potential Windows-dominance threat was anything worth thinking about. Remember when they thought MSN was an *alternative* to the Internet? Anything they don't utterly control, they hate.)
It is true that for a long time, Java was one of the all-important buzzwords, but it didn't pan out quite as well as it might have.
Sun was important, but not *that* important. CERN was far more important....
-Rob
Businessweek http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_ 19/b3983043.htm
and this guy had a bit in forbes...
http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/27/sun-mcneely-mcvoy -cx_lmcv_0426mcvoy.html?partner=yahootix
but I am sorry, I am sure 'Maximum Linux' has a much better op ed describing the situation.
What was that Family Guy quote? Didn't it go like this:
Lawyer: So, Mr Griffin, is Brian Griffin a sex-crazed dog or an irresponsible alchoholic?
Peter: Ah,ah...
Lawyer: Drunken lunatic or terrible father?
The world is not black and white. These choices on /. are annoying. Sun is a good company, not a great one, but giving an either/or question with disconnected answers is fallacious.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
His taking sole credit for the creation of millions of jobs is self-aggrandizing and doesn't deserve anything but a shaking of the head for his narrow-minded conclusions.
Well, it's not really self-aggrandizing. McNealy didn't say it himself; it was said to him by an employee buttering him up after some bad press.
I don't agree with the conclusion either. Honestly, the article itself even admits that no one was listening to McNealy when he was pushing the whole "the network is the computer" idea. Everyone saw it as a transparent bid to get people to buy expensive servers and expensive dumb workstations as part of the repeatedly "next thing" thin-client model.
Even today when people spend 90% of their time on their PCs surfing the web, checking email, etc., the network isn't the computer. Applications are all still hosted on the local machine with the exception of webmail clients. There's a growing industry of AJAX-based application services websites, but they haven't come to dominate yet, and they're over 10 years too late and way too different from Sun's marketed model for McNealy to claim any credit anymore than Jules Verne could take credit for us finally going to the moon.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Jonathan Schwartz is making the same mistakes that got McNealy and Sun into trouble. Instead of concentrating on creating new avant-garde technologies (which is what the old Sun was about), McNealy launched a Microsoft and Linux-bashing propaganda campaign. Now we see Schwartz using the same hype tactics. It's a shame because I liked the old Sun. I really did. Will it return? I am not so sure anymore.
I would be willing to bet most of those 'java jobs' would still exist, only using a different language.
Sure, a few might have been created just beacuse java existed, but not many.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bill Joy.
His early yet elegant productivity enabled a generation to create and communicate.
But really, the heroes are the people who wrote the documentation. Because all the technology in the world is useless if the next guy can't figure out how it works.
McNealy never created any job but his own.
Linus certainly created many jobs. He, however, would not be able to do it without the foundation built by Richard Stallman and the efforts of many thousands of OSS developers and supporters.
Stallman's Personal Home Page
Although I question the numbers, (they are a bit high), I will say that I was employed right out of college because I could manage Sun servers and Solaris. From there, I learned, and used other Un*x and Un*x like operating systems. Today, 95% of what I do is still running on the same operating systems. Was McNealy the only reason? Nope! But, he sure did help early on.
He should be on everyone's Christmas card list!
to believe such a person could do something as complex as create 1 million jobs. Surely it was our intellegent designer in disguise, for he is responsible for all jobs.
Count up the number of people working tech support, virus control, and PC services. Those industries didn't exist 20 years ago. Bill Gates created more jobs because there are more PC techs than Network Admins on the planet. Bill Gates wins. Or whoever created disease: healthcare employs more than technology. I think whoever it was that invented diseases should win: he must be a great guy for creating so many jobs!!!
But seriously this topic has too many hot-button words to not be considered flamebait. Read the last sentence out loud in any data centre and you will have a fight!
somewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
I think it is stallman who would not have succeed at HIS goals without the pragmatism of linus.
Shut up! Fascists are not like that you close-minded hippie. I am a Fascist, and I am deeply offended by your suggestion that Fascists dont care about human rights and such. Just SHUT UP! Do not confuse authoritarians with Fascists.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
Without Java being integrated into Netscape, Microsoft wouldn't have cared so much about browsers. They'd just ship a toy like MS Paint, Notepad, etc.
Because of Sun, because of Java, we have IE. (and ActiveX, and VBscript...)
In Sun's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows: -
"I am great MCNEALYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The CEO of CEOs; this mighty Company shows
"The wonders of my hand." - The Company's gone, -
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Cybertron.
Don't get me wrong, Suns were fine platforms, but McNealy didn't "create" the web or all those jobs in any way, shape, or form.
Neither did Microsoft or Windows.
Of course, the author of the article insists that either Microsoft created the web, or that Sun did, and doesn't even consider how it actually happened.
Would these millions be without a job, or would they be doing something else. Say that there would be no network at all. Then people would burn things on CD's and use couriers the get data across.
Due to the amount, that could mean even more people working then now in Networking.
An example. Because of networking, people can do homebanking. This means less tellers. This means people in banks without a job.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I have to laugh about all the Technology that Sun supposedly invented. Please! Sun's original success came not from invention, but from surfing fast and hard on (Joy's) BSD and (Bechtolsheim's) commodity hardware workstation. Invent as little as possible and innovate like crazy using cheap building blocks (HW & SW) while (Scott)promo'ing and selling the hell out of the result was the original Sun recipe for success. It is a good recipe and would still be working if Scott hadn't tried to turn Sun from a technology exploiter to a technology inventor, trying to ape DEC, HP and IBM, the firms Sun vanquished in the workstation market. Look at what Sun did invent. SPARC, useful for a time but hung onto way too long. Solaris, ditto, and when finally open-sourced too little too late. Java, a great achievement, but Scott was too fearful to let it go free. And the failures in the storage business, where Scott's old bomb-throwing ways could have earned billions in high-margin revenue and turned a stodgy backwater into an industry leader. But NO -- buy a mainframe tape company for billions in cash. A brief overview of the whole sordid story here. What Scott did well was to create a culture where everyone went 100 MPH towards the current goal, and when the inevitable mid-course corrections came, turn on a dime and continue at 100 MPH. A rare and wonderful accomplishment. If only he'd left on a high note.
The web isn't a network? Looks to me like it is a network of networks, a lot of them. The users are only looking at web sites they created and host on their own machines, and are sending email to themselves?
The web has evolved as it should, both the end user machines and the network servers need to be powerful and complete in function, and as the web expands, the distinction betweeen server and client will blur. P2P is already showing the potential there.
Sun has been going down since the 90s. The only thing that has saved their sorry-ass hardware has been Java, the most overly marketed and underpowered language next to Visual Basic the world has ever seen, or will see.
Today, their best machines are Opterons. They still push the lame-ass Slowlaris. Ever try to install it? Installer blows chunks, doesn't work with common hardware. Software makers are dropping it like a hot potato.
If Sun had 1/4 the people it has now, it would still be too large. Its Sparc machines blow chunks, at low velocity. Slowlaris is the worst excuse for a modern OS that exists save XP. Java is on the rapid decline now that people see the bill of goods they have been sold, and the easier development paths for Python, Ruby, and yes, Perl.
There's only one Jobs, and his name is Steve.
(And to be honest, I'm pretty sure Scott McNealy didn't create him.)
Off by one letter: McNealy was responsible for creating millions of 'jabs', mostly at Microsoft.
We really owe the "millions of jobs" to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and Bell Labs for developing UNIX and making it available to academia virtually for free.
And, if I remember correctly, Digital Equipment Corp. (remember them?) coined "the network is the computer" not SUN.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
...In any case, Bill Clinton was responsible for the economic miracle of the 1990s...
...That much of it turned out to be based on a .com-bust business model and crooked Enron-style accounting is George Bush's fault...
You really need some economics classes.
Nasdaq peaked on March 10, 2000, and the Dow Jones on January 19, 2000, according to wikipedia. Thus, the decline started during the Clinton administration. I don't think the flagrant disregard for generally accepted accounting practices can be blamed on a president, however.
Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz are suits (Scott was the MBA "business" guy who helped found Sun; Schwartz is a former McKinsey consultant) who have long had a mutual admiration society. This is little more than Jonathan giving Scott one last bit of fawning fellatio on McNealy's way out.
Advice: on VPS providers
Maybe I'm misremembering something, but as far as I recall, it was Larry Ellison who pushed the "central server - dumb worldwide clients" concpt. Sun has made fine workstations from the word go, why would they care about thin clients?
As far as I can tell, Sun was a hardware shop - they had this unique processor architecture (Sparc) that had certain advantages and certain disadvantage like all architectures and one of the advantages was fast I/O and that made it perfect for networking. On the other hand it was lousy for number-crunching. So they packaged an OS on top of their processor (SunOS, later Solaris) and sold it and made fine money with it because it was a useful product. There's a reason why the majority of the early web ran on sparcs.
In that sense, the www has to thank sun, which was instrumental in its creation.
(But these days they have me puzzled: their hardware is a commodity platform, their OS is open-sourced -- just how the dickens do they pay the bills? Who would still give money to sun and why? What's the business model here? And how does it differ from we.give.stuff.away.using.ajax.dot.com?)
But in the whole stoy I can't see where sun has ever been a mover or shaker in the application-distribution strategy desicions of the people. What have they ever promoted or created that really made someone use "the net as a computer" rather than doing the exact same thing locally? Did I miss some killer-app somewhere?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Was Scott a programmer or just a really active user?
The speech has the feel of a eulogy, high praise for "our dear, departed friend". I suppose one should wait until the body is in the ground, or out the door, before heaping dirt on it.
my job was made possible by the good people at 3Com and Cisco. Thank your for ethernet and routers.
Their greatest failure is not to do much better.
Here is a company with world class hardware and software, and completely failing to exploit the market though "lack of grip on reality" Scott McNealy is definitely in the same league with Ken Olsen in having some bright ideas, but too much ego to make the best of them.
The world is aboslutely gasping for something better than Wintel, and DEC, Apple and Sun had it. Only Apple is only now recovering from the afflictions of Big Ego striking it down. DEC died of Big Ego, and Sun has barely survived.
Sun has a good reputation for quality in hardware and software. Every computer professional and Nerd knows it. Even their support is well regarded. Why are then not trouncing Microsoft and Intel? (I dont know. I am writing this on an Ultra60 running FreeBSD.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I say he didn't create jobs, he destroyed. Honest, hard working American office workers have been replaced by computers and a bunch of geeky nerds posting on slashdot during work hours.
Machines don't make jobs, machines destroy jobs!!!1one
it network computes when it's network computing time, McNealy or no. Just as ICs happened when it was time for ICs to happen, and light bulbs happened when the conditions were right for light bulbs.
Major error in the summary:
Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality.
Where in reality, the Schwartz article clearly states:
he talked about network computing in a very strange way - he just assumed the future, he'd already moved his entire mindset, and his lifestyle, to the network.
There is nothing in there about McNealy being the only guy able to bring the network computing vision into reality. But he have the vision early on - us old timers clearly remember Sun at that time, and their vision that was very clearly stated.
Is the posting a little sappy? It's very sappy. But it never says or suggests that McNealy single handedly did anything.
Your opinion shows how right Stallman is promoting GNU/Linux name. Some people do not understand that 3/4 of GNU/Linux is GNU (the system) and 1/4 is Linux (the kernel).
You can run GNU system with another kernel (BSD, for example), but without GNU the Linux kernel is not of much use.
So, no, Linux would've not succeeded without GNU foundation provided by Stallman, not vice versa.
And has been for years. All of their business has gone to Linux or Windows. Pony tail Schwartz will just help push them into further oblivion. He's an idealist without any grounding in reality. Wall street will eat him alive. It's sad actually as Sun had some good product. Such is our industry.
What an amazing statement. I take it you don't do any remote banking, your workplace doesn't use one of the Web based CRM or system management apps, etc.
Actually, I use both online banking and web apps at work. I see your point. Fair enough.
I tend to think of the web essentially as a data store and batch system whereas most of the interactive content creation tools are all still based on the local PC which requires more expensive and capable hardware than the thin-client model says is necessary. Until PCs do almost nothing and next to no data is locally owned, then McNealy's vision of the future still hasn't come true.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
However, gnome is too customizable for many end-users. One large client rejected the Linux solution because their users kept rearranging their menus until they couldn't find things anymore. We had a tarball to restore their desktop, but it got very annoying very quickly to constantly have to restore it. They ended up going to Sun desktop on a Sunfire server and the neat stateless clients where your desktop follows your access card. Another shop went with a Windows Citrix server "because our applications need to be 100% 'compatible'".
Another smaller client tackles the high TCO of Windows by not dealing with it. They buy cheap $400 PCs. When they get a virus, or develop a hardware problem, there is no attempt to diagnose it - the PC is just "worn out". They junk it and buy a new one. They keep mail and documents on a server, so only wallpaper, bookmarks, and such are lost. Although some of the problems might be fixable, at $100/hr service cost this approach is likely cost effective on average. They very kindly "throw" the "broken" PCs in our direction, which is why our LTSP thin clients are "free".
I agree that Java on the client is cumbersome. However, on the server it is sweet. Switching between PPC AIX, Intel Linux, and Sun servers is a snap (other than learning the system administration differences between the flavors of unix). We just copy the application binaries and files over, and presto! Instant port.
I'm confused - if Scott was really responsible for that, what exactly did Big Bird do??? And Barney??? Where does he fit into this??????
When I first saw the article, I thought Apple had announced a new iClone...
Millions of Jobs? Where would they find enough black turtlenecks?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
MCN was a great guy for a CEO no doubt about this. But more interesting may be the inovative turn arround only Schwartz can bring to Sun. If we remember the Open Sourcing push for Solaris and Co. from Schwartz, or at leat the test a Server for 60 days, than we may consider, that he may be hte only one to safe the Sun!
Last time I checked there were 4.5 million Java developers. I assume most of these people are paid to do this. At least some of them are (more than 1 million). You could argue that since Sun developed Java, it's responsible for creating these jobs. Since McNeally has been the CEO of Sun since the begining he gets credit. This doesn't even get into all of the people that are doing work relating to the sparc processor, Solaris system admins, the people working on Java Enterprise System, or the 30,000+ people currently working for Sun.
No Sigs!
Do they wear a million turtlenecks?
Yet only one led Apple Inc. ;-)
*ducks*
If you RTFA instead of riffing on the ./ post title, which isn't even Jonathan Schwartz's blog post title - "When I first met Scott..." - you would see that while, in one short paragraph, he does lionize MacNealy, comparing him to Henry Ford and making the claim of launching a million jobs, most of Schwartz's blog post is a lot more realistic.
He accurately points out that, when Windows 95 shipped, Microsoft was sweeping all before it, including Apple, which was adrift at the time. It took a lot of balls to say "No" to Windows then.
Too bad Sun didn't make more out of that decision. Apple now has 20% more revenue and half as many employees. The plan seems to have been to milk the Internet bubble forever. "The network is the computer" is just a slogan. There is no special AJAX or WebOS sauce in Solaris.
Schwartz praises MacNealy for holding down job cuts in R&D. But you have to ask "What the hell are 30,000 people doing at Sun?" when Apple somehow manages to make the best personal computer hardware, and personal computer OS software, and the best consumer electronics device on the market, all with one quarter of the number of employees as Microsoft.
Schwartz is very, very smart. He knows he has to make big changes, like getting the open-sourcing of Java right, and figuring out how to use Linux, during his honeymoon time in the CEO position or the chance will be lost.
What Schwartz does not mention is that MacNealy set a bad tone and created problems unneccessarily. Statements like "You have no privacy, get over it." and the inability to get out in front of the Linux parade are the reasons Schwartz is in and MacNealy is out. Hopefully this is the last time Schwartz looks back. He has plenty of very hard work ahead of him.
I wrote parts of this stuff
The reason we are cursed with such a horror as NFS, is that in fact, at the time, it was so damn good and so much better than everything else and so early on the scene that it's practically embedded in our computer's dna. Sun I believe is responsible for that. And that is what they meant when they said the network is the computer. Not the internet, but the LAN.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If it weren't for Sun, the argument is, some other internetworking and lan technology besides TCP/IP might have been the path, which might have grown much more slowly. The phone companies were pushing for the 7-layer stack et cetera...
I18N == Intergalacticization
"First Sun releases Java.... at no cost. Then there are demands for it to be on more platforms. Sun provides it on more platforms. Now there is a demand for Sun to release their source code! What is the big deal? Projects like Mono seemed to have little difficulty re-implementing the basic .NET architecture with reasonable performance - why the hold-up with Java? Perhaps it is because there are already free (as in beer) versions of Java for the majority of developers, there is not such much demand."
You want to get that Deja Vu feeling, just look at what happened to QT. Almost the exact same thing. BTW "Harmony" use to be the name of the open-source replacement for QT, untill Trolltech "bent" to the demands.
Well, and what actually happened with the strategy Sun adopted? Sun lost control to "Microsoft bastardization"--.NET is essentially an incompatible Java, completely with Java backwards compatibility.
.NET implementations, giving developers easy cross-platform capabilities between Windows and Linux should they desire that.
If Sun had turned Java into an open standard, every Linux system would be using Java now, for both desktop and server apps, many of Java's technical bugs would be fixed, and C# would have ended up like VisualBasic. Instead, Sun's move allowed Microsoft to take the high ground and make C# an open standard. The open source community has created multiple C# implementations and gone to work innovating and improving the platform, as well as integrating it with the Linux desktop. As a result, some really nifty Linux desktop apps are being written in C#. And, as a bonus, there are also open source
BTW, this is a repeat of the NeWS disaster; that, too, was a nice core idea, the design had some serious flaws, the implementation was mediocre at best, and ultimately the industry rejected it because Sun was waffling on whether to open it or not. Sun apparently doesn't learn from their mistakes.
Only a true idiot would think that Al Gore doesn't deserve any credit for the Internet. Al Gore funded the backbones and opened it up to business so there could be independent ISPs outside the military and education. He was touting the Information Superhighway all through the '90s and had been providing Congressional support for its construction before he was tapped to become VP. This is common knowledge.
From the link:
I wouldn't be surprised if Sun has produced more technical people who have gone on to lead other companies than any other technical company based in the valley. Nobody gives Sun credit for that and we should--Sun's contribution to this industry is bigger than Sun itself.
The allegatations regarding NT and VMS were more, complicated than you make them out to be. Not only was David Cutler hired away from Dec (and VMS) to build NT, but so was half of the VMS team. It is thus no surprise that the NT kernel really looks like a sort of rushed version of the VMS kernel. Microsoft ultimately settled with DEC in their lawsuit.
(I personally suspect that the development of NT and the hiring of VMS programmers was a specific attempt to kill DEC which it ultimately succeeded in doing-- however since the DEC suit was settled, I am not sure that there are any antitrust options available in this case, but IANAL and I don't know the lawsuit well or the settlement. Technologically, NT pales in comparison to VMS.)
BTW, regarding stability of NT, prior to NT4, device drivers ran in ring 1 (I think) on Intel chips. This was changed because it was believed that the context switching of this model intruced some performance penalties, and that the elimination of these penalties was more important than the additional stability that running the drivers with fewer permissions allowed.
Regarding RTF, I don't see it as a TeX ripoff at all. WHile I have not studied the format closely, there seems to be little room for a quick, simple word processor format (RTF) and a typesetting programming language. If it is a TeX ripoff, then it is an abysmal failure on a scale that even Bob pales in comparison to.
Personally, I often find myself going back to old programs (like xfig and LaTeX) to get a lot of work done because they are often better thought out and more mature than more modern ways of approaching the same problem. I also use newer improved clones of older programs (VIM, for example, which I maintain is the world's best text editor combining many of the strengths of vi and Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift).
Clones of old software are not always the worst things in the world. Often you can be more productive on them once you put in a little bit of time into learning how to do stiff.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Scott McNealy's Java didn't do as much damage as Bill Gates's DOS so in that respect we may praise his holy name.
Seastead this.
Java has grown into a complex mess, and cators or organizations that are complex messes. It tries to use buzzwords and fancy-sounding hoopla to protect itself from reality, but the reality is that it is a big fat mess.
It takes 3 times longer to write and maintain Java code, and this is why it is a jobs machine. Good languages/tools actually kill jobs. Thus bragging that Sun stuff increases jobs may be true, but does not necessarily bode well for their ideas or technology.
180Solutions probably created a lot of jobs in the anti-spyware industry, but I'm not about to give them a gold medal.
Usama Bin Ladin created plenty of jobs in the national security bereau and I don't see the king of Sweden hunting him down with a chunk of gold on a string.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
- the people who broke the BBN cartel (prior to that you had to be a large company to get connected to the 'net, and more importantly, you were not allowed to resell packets/net access (ie ISPs were not possible)
- the advent of cheap enough routing hardware that small ISPs could form (I'm thinking of the Portmasters etc)
the first was most important - without it we'd still just have a research netflawed and ironically is the same basic argument used by proponents of Intelligent Design - that if just one peice of the puzzle was missing, the whole thing would collapse. This is false.
Remove McNealy, Gates, Ellison, the Pentagon, etc from the history of the internet, and the system simply would have evolved around them, either by creating an equivalent structure or by someone else inventing their key peice just a few months later.
Same is true of all science nowadays. Note how famous Watson and Crick became for discovering the structure of DNA. Did you know that they beat other groups (include that of Nobel winner Linus Pauling) by a matter of mere days, and mostly by virtue of guessing the right to up which to bark?
They, along with the computing gurus noted above, were all weeks from being completely forgotten by history.
> If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates.
First, I'll assume you meant recognized instead of rewarded. Second, let's not forget that it was IBM that started Gates. But let's go back farther: Texas Instruments had the first patent on microprocessor in 1951, and before that the first production integrated circuit in 1949. But why stop there? Bell labs pioneered the transistor in 1947! The transistor was actually patented in Germany in 1928, but Wikipedia says it's unclear if the Germans ever built one. Anyway, I'll stop there because it's as good a place as any.
I guess my point is that no single person paved the way. As Bernard of Chartres one said, "we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size." That's as true today as it was back in the 12th century.
Ok, Schwarzy, you can stop sucking now, he's not your boss any more. This is one of the stupidest pieces of goobledygook ever to disgrace the web. This guy's gonna run Sun? Run! For the exits! The funny thing, which is scary if you own Sun stock, is that this guy seems to think ideas are hard to come by, and that Sun has/had some kind of unique inspirational vision. Good luck selling that to customers - if you find any stupid enough to buy, more power to you. Any imbecile could have seen what would happen with networks long before 1990. Or anything else involving information, for that matter. I remember learning assembly programming in the late 80's. It was immediately and trivially obvious where things were headed. None of "innovations" of the past 15-20 or more years are *deeply* innovative, they're just better and more sophisticated mousetraps. Once you understand digitization and Moore's law, well, I've met a million guys in bars who have "the vision". That's because it's not very hard to have. It became generally available circa 1940. The hard part is making it happen, and McNealy's record is very mixed. Hell, Novell did more for networking than Sun ever did. In the end, Sun is just another widget vendor, which will be quickly forgotten. No, Scotty wasn't responsible for billions and billions of jobs created. But he probably was responsible for millions of jobs lost, thanks to his idiotic and personal vendetta against Bill Gates. Who knows how many of his stupid decisions were the result of this personal animus? My advice to anybody who owns Sun stock is to be very,very afraid.
Fortunately, Jobs didn't create Millions of McNealies
Umm.. there *is* a huge difference between the two. If you actually addressed what was said in full and in context, you might understand that. I'd be willing to bet, however, that you only know the "I took the initiative in creating" part.
Only a true idiot would pass judgement on a mere fragment of a statement. Take some ritalin and read the rest of the interview.
I think that headline should read: "Neally created millions of McJobs." Where would the fast food industry be without the heavy Geek consumption and where would Geeks be without the minimum wage burger flipping jobs?
Oh well, what the hell...
Can you imagine what would have happend if he had pattented it? The same amount of jobs created, but this time lawers.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The set of circumstances which spawned internet wouldn't appear decades later.
Creating equivalent structure without
funding and knowledge about perspectives of the global interneworking doesn't lead to same results.
As for Sun it doesn't that important.The NSFNET stage is much more important when it linked internationally.The Merge of Commercial networks is significant.The change of Cost of communications and ISP formation.
Sun is just a footnote in comparision.
Computer industry and millions of jobs aren't reliant on Sun in any way(free Java anyone?).Their products are not
must-have or revolutionary.
Actimates(tm) Barney was exclusively a Microsoft(tm) product.
I never got one, though I do own the innards of two Actimates(tm) Teletubbies. Cool, cool LED display matrix in one of those...
Amazing how a simple thing like classpath can hurt an otherwise great technology.
I can just see the man celebrating after their court victory; "Ha! we made Microsoft remove Java from their desktops! We win! We win! We...uh.....uh.......what did we just do? I mean,.....we......won......right?"
I will take a acerbit visionary over a hype machine that does not know what drives the tech industry anyday. Who you gonna bet on, Ballmer? http://www.tallsails.com/
What a load of FUD.
I've admined small networks of Suns and at work we've had huge networks of Suns.
It's pretty much the same skill set to deploy a Sun W/S to a desk, as a PC, on an established network.
Some things are much easier with NIS and NFS. Want to update the office suite, you install it on the server, once, then adjust the automount maps. Care to guess how you deploy MS Office?
And I challenge you to find a non admin application that has to run as root. Or attempts to write to NIS or in system directories. How many Windows apps still install crap in the system directories? And don't get me started on the registry. Yes, I like configurations in text files. How do you put comments in the registry or track changes?
By the late 1980's Digital Equipment had a network over over 100,000 computers. Those who were there will remember it as a lively "mini-internet". The claim that McNeally invented the network computer is...well...balony.
(I personally suspect that the development of NT and the hiring of VMS programmers was a specific attempt to kill DEC which it ultimately succeeded in doing-- however since the DEC suit was settled, I am not sure that there are any antitrust options available in this case, but IANAL and I don't know the lawsuit well or the settlement. Technologically, NT pales in comparison to VMS.)
The DEC Microsoft lawsuit is quite distorted, as it was more about the hiring of the DEC employees and 'fear' that the VMS technologies would be used by Microsoft. NOT that they were used.
Basically DEC was afraid that Cutler or his team had brought over technology from a project called Mica which was the new version of VMS they were working on at DEC. However, DEC had dropped the Mica project, which is why Cutler was so willing to leave DEC, they were canning his project and stifling his ability to do new things.
This lawsuit ended well for both DEC and Microsoft, as Microsoft got the people they wanted and DEC got money and development help and support for the Alpha CPU.
This lawsuit pre-dates the direction of the NT Kernel, let alone the implementation of the NT Kernel. Although the settlement did leave the door open for Cutler to be more free in using his ideas, as you can witness in some of the upper level constructs of NT.
There are a lot of people that like to claim NT is a just a new version of VMS, and this 'could' have been possible, but NT went a completely different direction.
When Cutler came to MS, they were given an open slate to work from, MS even held Xenix in case they wanted to implement the new OS based on a *nix path.
During the NT development process, the direction and goals for NT changed frequently and dramatically. It initially was to have more of an OS/2 framework, and the only concept that was even left from this was HPFS, which NTFS borrows ideas from, but ultimately was a rewritten FS.
There are also the rumors of the similarities between NT and VMS, and some of this has credibility, as Cutler was the architect of both, so why would people expect him to abandon his design style from one project to the next?
What people see as 'copies' from VMS are more of Cutler's touches to the direction of the NT project, but are not VMS copies. The DEC lawsuit did NOT allow for Microsoft using VMS code.
People should also note that the VMS Kernel and the NT Kernel are from two different worlds completely. VMS was not a MACH derivative, it was a monolithic kernel, far from the NT Kernel, although it did have support for modules, which would be more like the current OSX kernel. VMS had no concepts of a subsystem model which is a hallmark of the non-bound API Kernel (Client/Server) in Windows NT.
It would be more accurate to call VMS and NT brothers because they have the same father, but that doesn't mean one brother is a copy of the other whatsoever.
Think of this logically. Working at DEC, Cutlers work with Mica had to adhere to the VMS model and DEC's requirements. When Cutler went to Microsoft, he no longer had these constraints, and he was able to take what their team saw as the best OS theories of the time and implement them.
Basically it was a dream project of getting to start an OS from scratch using the best ideas of the day. With this in mind why would Cutler even want to try to emulate or recreate older VMS technologies for a new OS concept? He had a blank check of available technologies to work from, and even they were able to take current things that only existed in theory and implement them.
DEC and Microsoft ended up parting friends from this, and like I mentioned in my other post DEC was a strong supporter of NT, not only from the lawsuit, but partnered with Microsoft with NT and Alpha beyond the requirements of the lawsuit.
As for Microsoft destroying DEC, that is a far stretch. NT on Alpha helped the success of the Alpha CPU, bringing it to the desktop and server markets, which VMS could not have done.
"Network computing" existed long before Sun was incorporated. And MacNealy didn't create "millions of jobs", unless you wanna count the many suckers^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople who seem to think that COBOL can be converted to Java, or that Java actually *scales*. Heh. There's another pair of clusterf**cks for ya.
.NET to see which managed code environment can make itself so complex as to cause its own destruction.
Sun signed on with M$FT far too early, only to get completely ripped off by Gates. Now Java -- about the only thing of value apart from SPARC Sun ever created -- is in some sort of competition with
In the business world, Sun's got a pretty bad reputation, and it's deserved. They've made lots of stupid moves, and lost much of their market share in the meantime.
It's just more marketing bluster. Don't believe everything you read, particularly from this froot loop.
The documentation I found included the original documentation (from the early '80s) where SUN announced the 'The Network is the Computer' logo and declared that they would never again sell a machine without a network.
By the time I arrived on the scene, this attitude was so endemic to the company that I got into something of an email bitch-fight with a SUN sales rep who sold me an ethernet card without a MAC address EPROM. When I complained about this he responded that I should simply clone the address from the first ethernet card in the box.
When I told him that this was the first ethernet card for the box, he tried to explain to me how all SUN boxes were sold with Ethernet cards in them. I replied by telling him the serial number of the machine, and suggesting that he ask someone who was with the company when that machine was built "I suggest Bill Joy".
He quietly shipped the eeprom.
_____
The impressive thing about SUN's "the Network is the Computer" idea was not with thin clients -- but rather with the smart clients and fast central file-server model that allowed dataless and diskless desktop machines with lots of computing power on each desktop,
Among other things, this allowed the "one login -- any machine" environment where you could use your login on any UNIX box in the system that allowed you -- and could even move across CPU/Manufacturer lines with a minimal ammount of kludging. They manaaged to extend this to the point where you could fly across the country and log into a SUN box in New York and have minimal impact from the fact that your files were on a server in San Francisco (presuming that your cross-country network was reasonably fast.
The ubiquitous UNIX networking is also part of the reason why SUN became the a central part of the .com internet backbone... they had so much experience with providing rock-solid IP-based networking that you knew that you didn't have to worry about that part of your system.
(( Even though the original heart of UNIX was DEC, DEC insisted on their own big-iron server-based networking system and only moved to TCP/IP when it was clear that DecNet had lost the battle.)).
I think that SUN's eventual downfall was that they got stuck on the same seductive path as DEC and IBM -- that of trying to hold on to the high-cost high-profit margin world of big-iron. This was despite the fact that their entry into the market was at a relatively low end (albeit a $20K-60K low end). They climbed the ladder into the stratosphere of big iron, while effectively abandoning their original base of 'cheap' workstations and so left themselves vulnerable to the creeping featurism at the low end that they had originally mastered.
By the time they returned to tending the low end, it was too late -- Microsoft's termites had eaten their original base into an undependable sponge. Now, they have to re-establish that base, but against MS's millions of termites, and with their high-end being eaten into. It's not a fun position to be in.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Just imagine how many jobs Bill G. has created with his "High Quality", "User Friendly", "Secure" software like the Windows series of Operating Systems.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I believe that some of the people here is biased and not to the point. I spent a total of 21 years working for IT companies, and the last 10 working for the so-called "Sun ecosystem". Either as a Sun employee, partner, or competitor, I happened to work for that ecosystem, and I can count hundreds of people like me. The influence of Sun during the 90s was huge, as well as the relating competition (IBM, M$). There's no doubt that McNealy had a great charisma and the necessary vision to do his job, and even if now the things have changed (they always do), we shouldn't forget the "Sun ecosystem" relevance that allowed the industry to grow...
Yes.
THe desirability of networking for personal computers was already very evident by the late 1980's.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are a number of kiss-of-death indicators I see. Parallel -- Digital Equipment Corp. had a superb 3GL / script environment on hardware that was very cost-effective, or so they thought. Nobody would be buying those underpowered PC things. However, they started losing money big time because the management structure under Ken Olson (one of the industry's true greats, don't get me wrong) had gone stodgy and their product direction became inflexible. Then they bought loser PC technology, late (after trying to sell their vision of a PC -- and they thought they were competing against Apple, ignoring IBM's shadow. Remember the Rainbow? Urrgh) and tried to patch it up with great service. After Ken's Looong tenure drew to an end, Digital was Compaqted and vanished, despite having huge cash reserves and a great reputation.
Similarly, Scott McNealy and his long tenure has built up a large, monolithic true-blue corporate direction that has begun to diverge from where the money is going, and is showing signs of trying to rein in the industry to their vision; the problem occurs when your financial plans are built on speculation and the book-to-bill ratio goes badly awry. It's the bees knees, honest ... buy it because all your friends are going to be buying one too. Believe us. Ignore the disparity in price, ignore the fact that your flagship systems are no better than the open source equivalents, ignore the fact that people are not flocking en masse to the Network Computer, ignore that man behind the curtain...
And check their businss model -- Are they a software company? Their main software platform is competing with a product that is essentially free, as in beer. Yes, buy a Sun box because then you can use their version of Unix, which is wonderful and robust and ... very much not free. And do they sell Java? No, it's essentially public domain. You're not paying Sun to use it, just to prove your version is compliant.
A hardware company? Weren't their E-series supers a direct acquisition from Cray Research? Where is their new hardware research budget? Can they compete with the re-invented IBM and their research labs?
Are they a services company? Give me a break -- that's what Digital was saying just before they went under, just like at least a half-dozen other major players I've seen go down since 1970. RCA, Burroughs, others, same song before they sank. They claim services when they have nothing else.
Recap:
(1) Their operating system competes with hugely popular Linux, which is free;
(2) Their applications platform, Java/J2EE etc. is in the public domain; they only license the verification suite (check me on this, but I think it's true), and
(3) their hardware technology was bought, not built, and Seymore Cray is no more.
Unload the stock now. Let the rationalisation begin.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I rememebr Sun networked computers in the late 1980's when I was at University. Really cool, and I liked the idea. Seems to me that Sun *has* been on a relative decline since then - not unlike Apple in the same period of time, but without an iPod to ressurect their fortunes.
They had a bit of a 'boom' in the 1990's but from what I heard, a lot of it was through stock-for-stuff swaps with these internet companies, many of which went under. This event may have accelrated a decline since this would have starved Sun capital-wise.
..there were thousands to millions of Linux and BSD and Windows computers on it, were SUNs.
.. out there.. then.
SUN, HP, NeXT, IBM, and maybe a couple other brands were the only game going. And any of those of us that wanted to develop, we wanted to work with a Sun or a NeXT, since the GNU tools were most commonly found on those.
Actually, we wanted things that ran BSD, but BSDs hardware requirements were a bit
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
"He invented the ipod.
Please! That is like saying disease and war created thousands of good jobs. All hail the aids! :p
The druglords in Columbia probably creates more jobs than Scott McNealy. First off, they hire or contracts farmers, technicians and factory-workers, smugglers, dealers, distributors, soldiers and guerillas, torpedos, hitmen, etc... Indirectly they contribute to create extra work for police forces, customs service, the military, insurance companies, private security companies, hospitals, rehabilitation centres, politicians, diplomats, etc... which in turn creates even more work for other businesses, such as IT, telecommunications, construction, etc... By this logic we should be thankful to those druglords for all the jobs they have created.
There are other metrics that are just as irrelevant, but when it comes to a company CEO, I'd say the most important one is increasing the profits of the shareholders. As a human, there are other metrics, but creating "jobs" isn't one of them. Reducing sickness, disease, poverty, unhappiness, war, crime, etc... are goals I would put much higher. And maybe pushing for more computer networks have done just that, but then I would like to hear that argument.
Hmmm. Seems either uninformed or revisionist. Bill Joy went to Sun witht he work of many on that BSD software tape. BSD was mature at that point, and it didn't take much for him and others at Sun to make SunOS out of it. Certainly not the level of effort that originally went into it. And, don't forget the effort of the BB&N folks on the networking code, which is what the BSD folks started with...
You also seem to be forgetting about Andy BechtolSheim. It's say he did a lot more singled handedly than Bill Joy.
As for the documentation people being the real heros.... wow. I've done that job before, but it's a million times easier than creating new things, like the BSD folks and Berkeley and Andy Bechtolsheim did.
How about we give credit to Mr. Berners-Lee and the the little NeXT box that was the base of this network computing! Sun made nice boxes, but isn't the web becoming more about devices? Like the Cobalt machines that they went about eliminating...
Anyone else read the title as meaning McNealy had made Steve Jobs clones?
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
C# is NOT an open standard. ECMA "standards" can be patent-encumbered, which C# is.
I fully understand the idea that the "network is the computer", but as someone who's beein in IT for almost 20 years now, having spent a lot of time in the mainframe world, I'd have to say that Sun's weakness, at least in the enterprise space, is that they don't understand that the data is the most important thing.
Sun's storage products have always been fairly half-a*sed compared to the bigger players like IBM, EMC and Hitachi.
To me, the "network is the computer" leads to, "the servers are irrelevant". The server has become the middleware - easily replacable. It's fairly easy to replace your Solaris Oracle servers with Linux Oracle servers, or (perish the thought) MS-SQL servers. But getting all those Terabytes of data, which is what really counts, onto a different platform is difficult.
Purchasing StorageTek was a step in the right direction, but StorageTek's strength has always been tape and robotics. Not really tier-1 storage. They have partnered with HDS for high-end data storage, only through necessity I feel, and they still really don't seem to get it.
(Posting anon as I used to work for STK, and now, by default, Sun.)
Good God! If Sun creates millions of copies of Steve Jobs all capable of reality distortion, perhaps they will finally convince people that a Java based GUI IS fast. AAAAAAA!!!
Bob Kahn can be given most of the TCP/IP credit, along with ARPANET researchers, Vint Cerf, and other colleagues at places like SRI, BBN, PARC, various universities. Bob Metcalfe at PARC for Ethernet (which got some inspiration from MAC and other projects at MIT I think, along with various contemporary telecom industry protocols).
You look pretty informed about VMS, so may I pick your brain?
Who owns the IP for the original VMS IP (patents, copyrights, whatever)? HP/Compaq?
Was there any talk ever about opensourcing it?
Cheers,
CC
-Solaris 10.
-Java.
-Sparc.
-E20K/25K servers.
And so on.
The R&D is fine, the problem is that hardware comoditazion is making innovative companies redundant since the same problems can be tackled by brute force and not elegant design.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.