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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.
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.
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!
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.
... 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
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.
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.
I think what the blog article, and the original letter, were saying is that McNealy was right. His vision back in the early 90s was of an open network, where the important thing was the network, not the devices connected to it, and that was the world we were moving towards. It's a world built on open standards with all sorts of room for innovation and differentiation. Schwartz is not claiming that McNealy invented the Internet. He was saying that McNealy's vision of the future was the correct one unlike all those other companies who killed their own R&D and fell into the Redmond camp because they had seen the light (from Redmond and Wall Street).
As for Microsoft... if not Microsoft, someone else would have filled their role. Apple perhaps? Digital Research? Who knows. I don't think Microsoft did anything really brilliant or overly original in GUI design. As for "the Network is the Computer", Microsoft had to be dragged kicking and screaming into embracing the Internet and any open standards that they didn't control. The Internet wasn't even on their radar until Sun, Java and Netscape scared them.
Finally, you have to put Schwartz's blog in context. It was written as a tribute to McNealy, his mentor. The original letter, paraphrased from two years ago, was written to cheer up his mentor when Sun's fortunes were sinking and the Wall Street boys were savaging McNealy. I'm willing to give Schwartz a bit of leeway on the hyperbole.
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..."
We all know it was Al Gore who invented the internet.
.com-bust business model and crooked Enron-style accounting is George Bush's fault.
Al Gore didn't invent the internet. He took the initiative in creating it.
Two totally different things.
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
...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.
Seems largely retarded to take credit for jobs created indirectly, since there's no logical place to draw boundaries in either space or time.
A-Bomb
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.
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.
I'd say, in recent history, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee did the world a great favor by making HTML so easy to use and forgiving (i.e., not closing a tag doesn't cause the page to crash, unlike syntax errors in 'real' programming languages), then NCSA gets credit for making a great browser, then Marc and Jim deserve credit for stealing all that NCSA talent (and possibly some code) to make a really cool browser, and oh yeah, before I get too far, let's not forget Bob's Ethernet, and whoever made TCP/IP, and I guess we need to include K&R and everyone else who made UNIX, because that's what the Internet has mostly run on through its history. And as great as the network is, it's prety useless without nodes, and Bill Gates' *ahem* methods of popularizing DOS and then Windows has put ten times more nodes out there than all other contributors combined.
But some guy in the corner with a "vision" that just happens to align with what eventually occurred? Fuck him. If anything, that honor should go to Vannevar Bush, who, in 1945, had a pretty damn accurate vision of what computing would be like in the 1990s. Considering that he wrote this a year before ENIAC was unveiled, I think we can give him a pass on not predicting network storage.
(On page 4, look for 'memex.')
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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...)
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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.
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft
Well, no. Microsoft didn't do anything for the Internet. A little Australian company called Trumpet Software produced Trumpet Winsock which allowed Windows machines to connect to the Internet, well before Microsoft ever cared about it.
I agree, and I'd like to take that one step further. This is leadership change in a large, influential company. Having talked to some Sun people this last weekend, I get the feeling that they don't have a clear picture of what this means for them and their lives. And that might translate into a lack of trust, or a belief that the senior management is confused.
Schwartz was posting as much for the rank-and-file Sun employee and investor as he was for his mentor. He has to show that he's a team player and that he's not just grabbing the reins from somebody who he thought was an idiot. If the rest of Sun believes that the guy at the top thinks the last X years under McNealy has been a waste, then what does that say about their OWN work and sense of worth?
No! It was Adam... he was the first man, right? Even though all of the other people couldn't have been created without Eve, Eve was made from Adam's rib, right? So it still goes back to Adam.
But wait a minute... didn't God create Adam? But then where did God come from? A Christian once told me he knew God was real because of the Bible, so God is from the Bible. But who wrote the Bible? This is so bloody confusing.
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.
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.
It's turtles all the way down, ya know?
Program Intellivision!
There's only one Jobs, and his name is Steve.
(And to be honest, I'm pretty sure Scott McNealy didn't create him.)
Instead, MS treated users to blue screens of death for decades when simple things like memory protection were well known.
You're aware that one of the most common causes of a blue screen used to be memory protection violations in device drivers?
This is not to say Windows didn't crash a lot. I ask only because, given the way you worded your sentence, you appear to have pulled it straight from your ass.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.
Unfortunately, you're probably right. Wall Street penalized Sun stock for a long time because of R&D spending. After the just released MSFT quarter, the stock dropped 11%. One of the reasons the analysts gave was the increased R&D spend.
On one level, this sort of short-sighted thinking makes me want to throw things. It's not good for the industry, and it's not good for the country. But the market is what it is. Given the speed at which capital flows these days, I don't see it changing.
Which begs the question of where future R&D is going to come from. Universities increasingly want to lock up and license anything remotely marketable. Government funding is sliding.
Not a good situation, IMHO, and I'm fresh out of brilliant ideas. Support any state initiatives, and organizations such as ACM and USENIX, is about all I can suggest.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
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.
, 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.
/. myths and people actually start to believe this crap.
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
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.
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
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.
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!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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
Even though they did little but stand in the corner with their vision?
What a distorted view of IT history!
Sun certainly did not 'do little but stand in the corner'. They were vigorous promoters of Open Systems in the 80s, working hard to encourage the use of UNIX and standard protocols against the attempts of competitors (like IBM) to keep things closed and entirely proprietary. The resulting wide use of UNIX and standards helped the original development of open source, and then Linux.
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
Was the rendering of malformed HTML the choice of Berners-Lee or the choice of the browser implementers?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
When you say "not good for the country", you don't specify what country you are referring to.
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.
I took your advice and did look things up.
... but RTF?! A TeX rip-off format designed for being able to portably transfer documents between Windows and Macintosh copies of Word as their actual format sucked? Yeah, no copying there!
In Win95, another process could easily corrupt another one's process memory. A simple demonstration of this fact were all the in-memory game patch tools which never required driver-level access.
As for the NT Kernel, it's so suspiciously similar to the VMS and RSX-11 kernels there was almost a lawsuit over it. Of course, this shouldn't be surprising because the primary designer (Dave Cutler) was the same guy for all three!
Selecting a word and changing the font? Have you conveniently forgotten the Macintosh?!
Yes, Apple (1978-1983 with the Lisa) and MIT (1984 with X-Windows) both copied the modern GUI from Xerox. Of course, their development efforts were simultaneous and independent. Microsoft (1985 with Windows), however, is in a bit of a different time scope.
"Client/server kernel technology, not monolithic or microkernel"? Do you have any idea what you're saying? I'm guessing you haven't taken an introductory class in operating system design. Please take a few minutes to view Wikipedia's informative article on the subject. In short, there was and still is plenty like it.
And then, of course, there are the strawmen. No one is claiming Microsoft copied the WinAPI or GDI/GDI+. Those are disingenius arguments. They're Microsoft proprietary and, quite frankly, not the greatest APIs. In fact, both are being phased out by Microsoft as fast as they are capable of pushing the whole managed code initiative...
Then you refer to Visual Basic (1991), in which anyone who was using computers at the time can quickly rejoin with Apple's Hypercard (1987) and its family of applications spawned.
And finally, if you had ever applied "the same eye of scrutiny" to Microsoft as you barely applied to Apple or Linux, you would easily have come to the above conclusions. (Apple is responsible for the first mass market personal computer. Linus's original announcement post made it clear he was making a derivation.)
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.
Yes. Major blunder on my part. I should probably avoid doing IM, mail, and Slashdot at the same time, on roughly the same topic, as I obviously cannot handle it.
How embarrassing.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
180Solutions probably created a lot of jobs in the anti-spyware industry, but I'm not about to give them a gold medal.
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.
No, it hasn't. Apart from the addition of generics and annotations in Java 1.5, very little has been added to the language in years. There is an increasing range of libraries and tools that you can use, but they are all optional - you can still code small apps with VI if you like. Java has deliberately avoided the traps that other languages have fallen into of frequently adding new syntax and features.
It takes 3 times longer to write and maintain Java code, and this is why it is a jobs machine.
3 times longer that what? Have you actually used NetBeans with its Matisse GUI designer? Have you used Eclipse, with its phenomenal code maintenance and refactoring tools?
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.
Ah - because development teams are so dumb that they actively take on tools and languages that make things slower to develop and harder to maintain? Nonsense, of course. Java is largely replacing C++ for commercial development because it is far faster to develop with and maintain. There are few porting issues, memory management is phenomenally easier, programs are safer, and there are standard deployment platforms like J2EE.
What else has Microsoft copied? The WinAPI, nope, they created it from scratch
And what a professional job they did, as revealed in the name of API calls that they thought they would never have to make public..... such as 'PrestoChangoSelector'
United Sates. I try to remember to mention country of origin, which sounds like a lame excuse, but a search for previous posts should bear me out.
If a country isn't mentioned, it might be reasonable to assume a US origin.
This isn't http://slashdot.jp./ From the FAQ:
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/3/04
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
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.
In Win95, another process could easily corrupt another one's process memory. A simple demonstration of this fact were all the in-memory game patch tools which never required driver-level access.
I didn't say they were impossible, especially Win95. Virtually all OSes have the potential for failure in OS level memory protection. It is called a freaking Bug.
You are missing the bigger point, as the prior post acts like Windows included very little or NO memory protection. When in fact it did, especially NT which was developed in over 15 years ago. Want to find a company that didn't put memory protection in until 2000, go look up Apple. This is NOT one area where Microsoft sucked. PERIOD.
IAs for the NT Kernel, it's so suspiciously similar to the VMS and RSX-11 kernels there was almost a lawsuit over it. Of course, this shouldn't be surprising because the primary designer (Dave Cutler) was the same guy for all three!
I actually though you might have looked some of this up, but here is where you start to lose all credibility.
The VMS kernel is a monolithic kernel that supports modules, it is not a hybrid (client/server) kernel like you will find in NT. If any Kernel architecture influenced the NT kernel it was the MACH concept for small low level portability, but certainly not VMS.
As for the lawsuit, this claim I find astounding, as Digital (Owner of VMS and where Cutler also worked) were very CLOSE partners with Microsoft, in fact they showcased their new Alpha CPU at the 1992 Comdex running an unreleased WindowsNT. (I was actually there, so quote me on this.)
If Digital had any intention of bringing litigation to Microsoft over the design of NT, there is no record of and actually record to the contrary.
VMS was a very simplistic OS technology, especially at the time NT was written.
Are you just trying to blow smoke, and if so up what? Or do you assume that all of us here are 15yr olds and were NOT around during the 80s and 90s?
Selecting a word and changing the font? Have you conveniently forgotten the Macintosh?!
Here is where you lost all credibility, what are you a child?
MS Word was RUNNING on the Macintosh when the select and modify concepts were written by Microsoft and adapted by other applications on the Mac in the subsequent years.
Are you the only person in the world that doesn't realize that MS Word was more popular on the Mac than on the PC, until like 1993/1994 when the success of Windows 3.1 was becoming substantial?
(Here is a Hint when looking up the Mac history, office based applications like MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe PageMaker where the key APPLICATIONS that gave the Mac credibility in Office and business environments.)
Yes, Apple (1978-1983 with the Lisa) and MIT (1984 with X-Windows) both copied the modern GUI from Xerox. Of course, their development efforts were simultaneous and independent. Microsoft (1985 with Windows), however, is in a bit of a different time scope.
Again you think we are children. Gates announced Windows for the IBM PC and started development on it almost at the exact same time Apple started working on the GUI for Lisa. (Go look up history, here is another search tip, look up Comdex Windows Lisa Apple)
Apple's big lawsuit against Microsoft was based on a few specific items that were not common to Xerox. Apple was using 'copyright' law because the success of Windows hurt their sales, especially in people that bought Mac to run MS Word and MS Excel which they could now but a Windows PC and run.
"Client/server kernel technology, not monolithic or microkernel"? Do you have any idea what you're saying? I'm guessing you haven't taken an introductory class in operating system design. Please take a few minutes to view Wikipedia's informative article on the subject. In short, there was and still is plenty like it.
Actually I do know a little bit about kernel technology, but you seem to be able to only recant words from wik
Fortunately, Jobs didn't create Millions of McNealies
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...
Mach, L3, L4, all are microkernel client server designs. Open GL code is made by the graphic card vendors. And hardware acceleration was in the origional SGI plans.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
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/
(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.
And what a professional job they did, as revealed in the name of API calls that they thought they would never have to make public..... such as 'PrestoChangoSelector'
:)
Well at least no one is claiming they ripped it off from Apple or someone else.
Maybe MS put the screwy stuff in there on purpose.
In Win95, another process could easily corrupt another one's process memory. A simple demonstration of this fact were all the in-memory game patch tools which never required driver-level access.
That's like saying that linux isn't secure cause driver-level access is never needed to play a sound file (you just pipe to
Win95 *DOES* have protection from *accidentally* accessing another process's memory (easy process has its own seperated virtual memory space). Win95 (AND NT, XP etc) have APIs that allow you to access another process's memory but you have to do this *explicitly*. It's how debuggers (etc) work and it's a feature that almost all other operating systems have.
Yes, Win95 had lots of bugs and a few flaws but given the context, your example is just plain ignorant.
Mach, L3, L4, all are microkernel client server designs.
Yep, but NT is not a tradition or true MACH kernel.
Open GL code is made by the graphic card vendors.
Ok, now you are scaring me. DirectX is actually implmented in the display driver also, but ATI and Nvidia did not write DirectX anymore than they wrote OpenGL.
Unless you are maybe talking about OpenGL extentions, which is a way new GPU specific features can be added to OpenGL.
Really not sure where you are coming from on this. OpenGL
And hardware acceleration was in the origional SGI plans.
Yes, and hardware accleration was in OpenGL before DirectX ever existed, this so was not my point. Go read again, the keyword: 'Gaming'.
SGI had toyed with adding more APIs to OpenGL for gaming and other uses, but even after circulating stuff on OpenGL++, they never went forward with it. Microsoft even tried to create some of these technologies for OpenGL with SGI, and HP in a project called Fahrenheit it was at the end of the MS/SGI relationship.
Look up stuff like 'Scene graphs'.
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
..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.
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.
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).
After the just released MSFT quarter, the stock dropped 11%. One of the reasons the analysts gave was the increased R&D spend
May I disagree?
My reading of the drop is not that WS disapproved of R&D per se, but they rather tought the extra money would be squandered fighting battles MSFT has no reason to fight, and no hope to win. Think land war in Asia.
I guess that for once, WS "analysts" are onto something.
Cheers,
CC
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.