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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.
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.
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 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.
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").
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.
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.
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?
I think there is some confusion here .. Where is it today?
r k_outage/
= 2005010107100653
Microsofts sucess owes more to them squeezing out competitors/partners than anything to do with providing a low cost client. Take a look at the litigation page on Groklaw to see what they are really good at. Remember this is a company who altered Outlook to block a web greeting card company when they wouldn't sell out to them.
The main reason you don't see thin client is because MS supressed the development of Java and reinvented most of its functionality in dotNET.
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
A medium sized PC running groupware supplying 10/15 diskless clients would be a lot more cost effective to the small company that Windows on each desktop. Remember Novell netware.
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?
It isn't a matter of having multiple clients. How is it not an issue. You update a single application on the server and the clients don't need to be each visited in turn. Remember the fiasco here recently when the department of works and pensions tried to upgrade all their desktops remotely and it failed.
Why can't I go into a shop and buy a $200.00 dollar netPC plug it in and it works. When I buy a DVD player I know it will play any DVD from any supplier regardless of who made it. Why don't the same economy apply in the PC market. Why a monoculture. Well we all know the answer to that don't we.
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates
You're kidding aren't you. What millions of jobs. A few hundred developers in Redmond yes. Some CD factory in China turning out CDs for 0.5p a go. IT is a drain on a companies budget. A business should be working to spend less on IT not more. You could also count the cost in lost productivity to endlessly managing Windows. Someone who works in providing medical equipment told me they spend a fifth of their budget per year on Windows licenses.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
If other business were as reliable as 'software' planes would be falling out of the sky, engines would fall off cars and fridges would explode. And people would take this as normal.
ref: outage kills 80,000 PCs http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/dwp_netwo
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page
davecb5620@gmail.com
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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