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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...
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
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
No amount of marketing can change this: if Java is not sufficiently opened, it will remain on the path to obscurity.
I love comments like this! They indicate what a strange reality some slashdotters live in - it almosts make me believe in parallel universes.
I eagerly await other posts from this other dimension:
"Intel - will it ever take off?"
"Windows - how it lost out to Apple"
"Linux - the ultimate game platform".
Actually I guess the message here is that no matter how much you really, really want something to be be true (Java on the decline) this does not make it true.
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.
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.
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
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").
Dare I point out that Linus created one small - vital, yes, but very very small - part of what people call the Linux operating system?
I think I do.
No single person stands alone. Linus would have remained in obscurity if the GNU project hadn't existed, and also if Minix hadn't existed. And neither of those projects stood alone either.
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!
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'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...)
"Jonathan Schwartz is making the same mistakes that got McNealy and Sun into trouble. Instead of concentrating on creating new avant-garde technologies"
.. September 1995 .. recommending Microsoft "jump on the Java bandwagon and take control" of its class libraries and run times"
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version. Wilfully breaking the write once run anywhere option. The one thing Java was supposed to do well. "McNealy launched a Microsoft and Linux-bashing propaganda campaign."
When someone launches a campaign to destroy your company and you comment on it how is that propaganda. His biggest mistake was in settling the long running court case.
a memo
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.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
davecb5620@gmail.com
There is more to software development than the web. I think that you grossly underestimate just how pervasive Java is in the business world. It's powering more than applications than display data in a web browser.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I would lay claim that Perl and PHP power more online transactions than Java does. Look at the world's most popular forum system, PHPBB. Yes, that runs on PHP. And people don't run LAMJ servers, they run LAMP servers: the P stands for PHP or Perl or Python, all of them open languages.
And I would lay claim that they really don't. You can combine all the online forums you like but they don't come near the phenomenal combined volume of stock trading systems, banking systems, airline booking systems etc. We are talking of system which individually handle hundreds of millions or even billions of transactions each day. Consider the combined volume of transactions of all these systems....
And before you mention google - that uses a considerable amount of Java as well.
I didn't say that Java is now unpopular in all domains, that is false. But I think that it will degrade because it will not have the ability to adapt like other languages can. If Sun goes down, methinks it would be all over for Java.
Java is constantly adapting, with regular releases with new features (well, new to Java anyway!): Generics, improved concurrency and higher performance for the GUI in Java 5; scripting language support and web services support and far better client side integration in Java 6. How is this not adapting?
Apart from the wild idea that Sun is going down (their annual losses are trival compared to their net worth, and that worth is not largely dependent on share value), there are companies with far, far bigger investments in Java than Sun, like IBM. They are constantly producing new VMs for internal and external uses.
If Sun did 'go down', Java would certainly continue (in fact, IBM could well buy up the rights and open source it!). That is one of the reasons why I find it such an appealing language - it is not a one-vendor language.
And if you want to chide somebody for wanting to overcome the competition, fine. But don't forget that the origin of all open projects is the desire to build a better product, and it's only because we want to be better that we can achieve that. Wanting something is the root cause for it happening. That's not a guarantee, but it's as close as we can get.
I was not chiding anyone for wanting anything. What I was gently ridiculing is a Slashdot speciality - stating what someone might want (for whatever reasons) as if it has already happened.
I want better products - I would rather that more people adopted MacOS that Windows. I wish I could play more games on Linux. I would prefer Java to be open source. However, we have to face reality.
There is not the slightest sign (at least yet) that Java has stopped growing in terms of its adoption - it is still in the growth phase. This may change in a few years, but to say now that 'Java will remain on the path to obscurity' is ridiculous in many ways - it implies not only that Java is going to be obscure, but it is already on that path, which is obviously false.
Like it or not, Java works, and works very well for a very large number of developers. It would be nice if it were open source, I agree, but it seems to me that its current status has had little impact on its adoption, no matter now much open source supporters may wish otherwise.
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?
It would be nice if it were open source,
Why? This seems to be a popular opinion on Slashdot, and I'm curious why people need it to be any more open than it is? I mean afaik, the only thing that isn't "open" about it is the spec. If you want to create your own implementation of a JVM you're allowed but it must conform to the spec. This is a very *good* thing IMO. It would really suck if MS had been able to complete its "embrace and extend" manuever on Java (which is what MS has done with the open web standards and browsers) and it would suck even more if there were 5 different JVM's out there and you had to tailor your code to run on each one. You would completely lose the WORA (or you'd have to do all sorts of gimmicky crap to figure out what jvm you were running on -thats a lot of fun with browsers and html, I think it would be even more annoying with code). So I ask again, not rhetorically, but honestly: why open source it? Am I missing something?
It's turtles all the way down, ya know?
Program Intellivision!
Why? This seems to be a popular opinion on Slashdot, and I'm curious why people need it to be any more open than it is? I mean afaik, the only thing that isn't "open" about it is the spec. If you want to create your own implementation of a JVM you're allowed but it must conform to the spec. This is a very *good* thing IMO. It would really suck if MS had been able to complete its "embrace and extend" manuever on Java (which is what MS has done with the open web standards and browsers) and it would suck even more if there were 5 different JVM's out there and you had to tailor your code to run on each one. You would completely lose the WORA (or you'd have to do all sorts of gimmicky crap to figure out what jvm you were running on -thats a lot of fun with browsers and html, I think it would be even more annoying with code). So I ask again, not rhetorically, but honestly: why open source it? Am I missing something?
I absolutely agree that having conformant java specifications is a great thing, and is perhaps the single most important reason for Java's success. But I don't see why being open source should conflict with this - there should be no reason why an open source product should not have to pass the tests in order to be called 'Java'. In fact there is a current project, called 'Harmony', that intends to do exactly this. Open source need not permit 'embrace and extend'.
I can understand that there are potential problems with open sourcing Sun's implementation of Java - there are most likely huge amounts of code that involve patented techniques or are licensed from other sources.
I like open source (or at least having the source) because I have had to deal with problems in closed source products that won't be fixed by the vendor. I am not after re-selling the product, or re-distributing the source, but the possibility of patching something myself is pretty appealing.
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.
, 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.
Java has several Free Software implementations, and the only real limitation they have is that they can't use the Java trademark. Kaffe, after a long absense, is back and is already mostly 1.4 compliant, GCJ takes an entirely different approach to implementing Java which is both innovative and supportive of what already exists.
Java will not die, whatever happens to Sun.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Because it's supposed to be 'write once, run anywhere.' At the moment, it's write once, and run on Solaris, Windows, Linux (x86 or IA64 only), Mac if you don't mind waiting a bit, and maybe IRIX if you are lucky. Only very recently have FreeBSD been allowed to distribute the port to their OS. If you look somewhere slightly more obscure, like OpenBSD, then you start to have problems.
The license means that OpenBSD are not allowed to distribute a ported version of Java. They can distribute diffs to the source code, but not the source or compiled binaries. Since Java requires Java to build, installing Java on OpenBSD requires following these steps:
- Install the Linux JDK, which runs through the binary compatibility layer.
- Download the source from Sun (manually).
- Compile the JDK. This takes a long time and requires a lot of RAM.
Since the Linux JDK is only supported on i386, you can't use Java on any other architecture (such as PowerPC or SPARC).I would much rather Sun used the trademark to protect Java. Make the JDK open source, but do not allow any patched versions to be called Java (so OpenBSD, for example, could include a binary of 'Columbian' that would run Java apps, but would not be called Java). Provide a mechanism for pushing patches upstream, so that if someone does port it to a new platform there is a good chance that the next release will actually support that platform.
To be honest, it's the second of these that is the clincher. The number of hoops the FreeBSD team had to jump to in order to be allowed to ship Java with their OS was insane.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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
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.
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.
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version.
The reason Java failed on the desktop was because Sun's desktop technologies sucked (and still do); Microsoft may have been planning to sabotage them, but they didn't even have to bother.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
I don't know about him, but I certainly am. Some time in the 1990's, Sun machines became overpriced and their software bloated and people looked for alternatives. By the end of the 1990's, Linux was the platform of choice for startups and universities (viz Google). None of that had anything to do with Microsoft, except that Sun didn't even attempt to compete with Microsoft at the low end.
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
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
Actually I know this is a large debate but I wish Java was more extended. Especially on Windows.
.NET and Ole support?
For example there is an app on work that uses a custom schedule app and I want to interface with it. I am learning java and there is no way to interface to the app and customize it without doing OLE/COM or a VBA script.
In portable languages like Perl and Python you can integrate heavily into each operating system if you wanted or remain portable..
Why can't Java have something like CPan and
Lets face it? This is the reason Java has not taken off on the desktop. The api and gui framework is the best out there but you can't integrate into windows like you can with C#.
http://saveie6.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.