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?"

Comments

Re:Credit for millions of jobs??

[TheNetAvenger]

, MS treated users to blue screens of death for decades when simple things like memory protection were well known. Crashes became commonplace to where they were just accepted as a part of computing by people.


You kind of lost all credibility... BSDs and Memory Protection are for the most part not related. The only Memory protection errors creating BSDs were in device drivers, the user application model on even Win95 (the hybrid it was) was protected memory.

Windows NT going back to 1992 also has full memory protection, a concept that MS actually did work on the improvement of the technology.

As for MS copying everything, explain a few things. The NT Kernel, nothing existed like it, and nothing since is like it either. Or how about selecting a word and changing the font, you know select and modify that exists in every GUI. It didn't exist prior to MS Word cira 198x, but now you see it used in almost every application and OS. There are literally thousands of things like this that MS was the 'creator/innovator' of, even if you choose to have a revisionist history.

What has Microsoft copied that everyone thinks is a 'copy' of something?

The GUI? Well, Apple and XWindows both copied this from Xerox, as well as Microsoft. Every major OS made now is a copy of the Xerox technology, so how is Microsoft different here?

Windows? It is based on the NT OS technology, something that is unique from both *nix and other OS/Kernel technologies at the time and since. There is nothing like it. It is a client/server kernel technology, not a monolithic or microkernel.

What else has Microsoft copied? The WinAPI, nope, they created it from scratch, the GDI/GDI+, nope again they created it, RTF - kind of a copy, but the document independance was new at the time and MS gave the RTF specs away. XHTML? Nope they were one of the main designers behind it as well.

What else could it be that I hear people refer to all the time that they copied?

Well there is techology like Visual Basic, which had a new GUI IDE model, but Microsoft basically made the creators rich (instead of just stealing their ideas) and bought them out.

MS technologies are actually 'less' copied than Applications and OSes. MS Word was NEVER a copy of Wordperfect, in fact by 1992, Wordperfect was scrambling to copy the concepts that had been successful in MS Word on the Mac for years.

Now should we put the same eye of scrutiny to Apple or even Linux? Linux was a monolithic copy of Minix, and even its technologies and microkernel design go back to what 1983, and if you follow the *nix concepts back to the 1960s.

OSX? The core OS technology Apple advertises that they copied the technology. It is a BSD based interface to a Mach kernel, almost a direct copy in fact of the source. How about even looking at the GUI in OSX? They use PDF/Display Postcript (licensed from Adobe - not their creation), for 3D composition they use OpenGL, which again they were not even a significant contributor to the project. It was SGI technology and later work into moving it to a gaming acceleration API was work done directly BY MICROSOFT.

Kind of fun to realize the OpenGL stuff OSX and all the 'open source' projects use has MS created code in it, but of course MS is the great innovation copier.

Keep repeating the /. myths and people actually start to believe this crap.

How about even instead of listening to me, you go look this up instead of just assuming MS is what others tell you it is.

Re:i realize it's fashionable to bash mcneally

[Stephen Samuel]

Actually, SGI's problems stem mainly from their decision to drop MIPS and pin their future to the Itanium. . . . . .

Another way of describing SGI's mistake is that they expected Intel to be technological leaders, as opposed to market leaders.

The last CPU that Intel produced that was decent in it's first (or even second) revision was the 8080 -- and even that was mostly because there was very little to compare it to at the time.

Then Zillog came up with the Z80 which Intel cloned with the 8085. There was nothing really good about the 8086 -- in fact my pet theory was then (and is still now) that IBM chose it because it was so badly designed that it would never be real competition for the cash cow that their /360 mainfraim line was (something that couldn't be said about the Motorola and National Semiconductor chips).

Intel then tried to produce a real 32 bit chip -- a marketing driven bastard child that died in infancy. The 80186 and 80286 were attempts to clean up the worst aspects of the 8086 without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but turned out to be little more than a foul tasting soup.

The '386 solved the problem by emulating the 8086 16 bit mode and providing an entirely new (well, kinda) 32 bit engine, but it wasn't until the pentium that they finally got even that right.

As I remember it nobody came to be a respected mover in the workstation market using an Intel-made chip. SGI and Apple went with Motorola. SGI eventually bought MIPS, and Apple rode the 68000 family for a decade before moving to another Motorola chip. DEC came out with the much-respected Alpha, and IBM/Motorola came out with the RS/6000 -- all of which allowed them to ride out (more or less) the MS/Intell steamroller.

By the end of the '90s I think that it was becomming clear that AMD was better at producing 'Intel' chips than Intel was. The outcome of the 64 bit 'intel' wars was no big surprise to me.

Given that history, I would have been very wary of betting the future of my company on Intel producing an industry-leading chip. History shows that the main thing that the Intel monopoly had going for it was that it was the 'standard' chip for the "Wintel" platform.