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Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs
alphadogg writes "Former CEO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz has taken to his personal blog, provocatively titled 'What I couldn't say ...,' to dish some industry dirt and tell his side of the story about the demise of Sun. He has already hinted at plans to write a book, and a new post suggests a tell-all tome could indeed be in the offing. 'I feel for Google — Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too,' Schwartz writes, apparently referring to Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC, which makes Google's Nexus One smartphone. As for Bill Gates, Schwartz says he was threatening regarding Sun's efforts in the office software space."
If his blog is running on a Sun box.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
...and couldn't say these things?
Somehow, I find that hard to believe.
Hopefully it'll be good stuff, like him only tipping 6% or never washing his hands when he took a whizz (because it comes out the end, not the sides). Hopefully they'll include the time he slapped Steve Ballmer upside the head for not siding with him over Vista's design.
But unfortunately it'll probably just be some boring anti-trust nonsense.
Summation 2
I wonder which Java patents Schwartz was referring to, Checked Exceptions or Type Erasure?
I hate MS as much as the next guy (er slashdotter)... but this whole article reads as 'gates said THIS and then I said THAT and he shut his mouth and the conversation ended!'.
Sun is a horrible company. McNeally was a clown. Schwartz filled his big ol shoes really well. Print your book... as many people will buy it as bought.... anything you've sold in the last 5 years. You can join Raph Koster in the 'I wrote a book and no one cared' section.
A CEO of a company cannot go about leaking any information that could damage the company unless he ok with all the shareholders suing him.
And a CEO does not necessarily own the company he runs, meaning he can(and would) be replaced.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
CEOs especially have to be careful. They don't want to piss off their biggest customers. Nor do they want to say anything that might negatively affect their stock price. And that could be anything, especially whinging on about Gates or Jobs.
Shooting your mouth off about everyone in the business is not a good way to win friends and influence people.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
...which means that any dirt dished will seem like sour grapes, and be ignored - so I guess at least he'll be consistent
These threats, and counter threats, happen all the time. He says so himself in the article, which is why they needed a good base of patents.
Not exactly damaging to the company.
It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html
Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.
The key is public company, meaning that his responsibilities are to the shareholders, as represented by the board of directors, at whose pleasure he serves. The board is usually themselves major stockholders and very, very rich people with their own networks of external influence. Sometimes people are on the boards of more than one company -- like Jobs with Apple, Disney and Pixar (hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?). So no, as others have said, just because compared to us he's untouchable doesn't mean he really is. And in jobs like that, what everyone else thinks doesn't just matter -- its the ONLY thing that matters.
A good, but old, book that gives an idea of the reality of Microsoft is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. (August 15, 1998)
The book was written by Jennifer Edstrom, the daughter of Pam Edstrom, manager of Microsoft's P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom, and a former Microsoft manager. The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..."
The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It's certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft's P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft's abusiveness in detail.
If you read that as a friendly reminder between CEO pals, you really have to take the Apple colored glasses off.
meep
"As for Bill Gates, Schwartz says he was threatening regarding Sun's efforts in the office software space." Well, what do you expect from a competitor?
I'm not sure why operating system adoption needs to be a battle to win. The venture almost certainly made multi-millionheirs out of its founders like Bill Joy and Scot McNealy, and just because over time it crumpled under new competition doesn't mean that they didn't have a good run of it. Hell, who wouldn't want to be in their shoes, even today?
Apple love software patents, stuff that's already been implemented elsewhere and simple enough to be created independently by any competent coder. Apple use off the shelf components, stuff that real innovative companies design and manufacturer to enable companies like apple to make their shiny toys.
"I love how people are eager to describe it as "Steve threatening to sue" when I see it as Steve showing an industry colleague the respect they deserve and picking up the phone himself to make a personal, direct call to provide advance warning and give the other company the chance to remedy the problem before the lawyers are unleashed."
Yes I always appreciated the bully saying "Give me your lunch money, nerd" before actually punching me in the face and then taking my lunch money. The robber who said "Hand over your wallet" is such a friend.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I hope that he cut off that damn pony tail.
Nothing about Larry Ellison?
Disappointed... no interest...
lol wut
Great idea, there hasn't been one of those published about either of them in the last two months or so!
But I could be wrong.
You're funny how much you just gush for Apple.
I enjoy it. Promise you'll never change.
According to Jonathan Schwartz, Steve Jobs told him "If you move forward to commercialize it, I'll just sue you." over the phone after Sun presented Looking Glass, a desktop concept similar to Mac OS X's. After that, Schwartz put Steve in his place:
"Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
I personally think it all of this suing is petty and dumb. This reminds me of when I was about 10 and when my little cousin would always say "I'll sue you" whenever he didn't get his way. Personally I think all these CEO's need to grow up and realize all they are doing is hampering technology and the advancement of the human race.
i see it the total opposite, if it went to court apple are not sure of winning , Job's makes a call , hopes to scare sun into submission and therefore you kill the competitors product without costing or risking anything.
Glad to hear that he sees this as the major post-leaving issue to raise. I think that's pretty significant in itself.
Hopefully this brief blog entry is just a teaser. It really is hard to draw a clear line between trolls, inter-company attacks, tax seekers.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I love how people are eager to describe it as "Steve threatening to sue" when I see it as Steve showing an industry colleague the respect they deserve and picking up the phone himself to make a personal, direct call to provide advance warning and give the other company the chance to remedy the problem before the lawyers are unleashed. If Steve was so evil, he just would have given the lawyers the go-ahead and the first Sun would have known of the issue is when the legal papers arrived. That didn't happen. Phone calls were made and companies were given the chance to fix the issues before it turned nasty.
I don't think you understand how big an undertaking litigation is. Steve made that call because he hoped to prevent a competitor from releasing a product he was nervous about. Respect had absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if he thought he would win (and Steve is neither a lawyer nor a GUI developer so he has no special insight into whether he would), lawsuits are expensive.
Now, I know that flies in the face of the oh-so-cool "Apple is teh evil!" that is all the rage lately but, seriously, can we get some perspective. Steve himself made a call. He didn't pawn it off on an underling. He showed his industry colleague the respect they deserve by making the call himself. He gave advance warning. He let the other company decide whether to take their chances or change their plans. He gave them the power to determine their fate. Sounds pretty respectful to me.
I find it fascinating that you and people like you will not be swayed by three decades of firsthand accounts as to how Jobs treats people, not only competitors but employees and business partners. Why are you so desperate to paint Jobs as anything other than a narcissist? I can understand you love Apple, but why do you extend that love to the CEO too? Can't you really like a movie without also idolizing the president of the production company? My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence - do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
I am not anti-patent. I hold a patent in fact but it is a hardware patent.
Software like stories, music, and math really should not be patentable.
I can understand Apple getting software patents just as Sun, IBM, and other companies do and as was explained in the blog they make a great defense. When any software company goes after another company with patents they are being a patent troll and are being evil.
Microsoft going after Tom Tom and Amazon with Linux patents == evil.
Apple going after HTC == evil.
In both of these cases it was double evil. Do you really think that Jobs was showing "respect"? Or that Gates was?
Both where hoping to bully their way to eliminate a potental threat.
Both where hoping that they could get Sun to give up a project with only a small chance of profit with at threat of a law suit.
Do you honestly think that Microsoft and Apple think they never infringe on anybodies patents?
Please it was a nasty business tactic and by all rights evil. Of course Jobs and Gates are sitting on giant money mountians and Jonathan Schwartz is posting on a Wordpress blog so being evil and nasty seems to pay.
Boy I wish Google had bought Sun. Not that Google is with out sin but I would love to see Google have OO.org, Netbeans, ZFS, and Solaris. Maybe they would have even made ZFS GPL. I would classify Google as a lesser evil at this time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
MS apologists and Apple fanboys teaming up together... now if only he said something nasty about linux, the rage would be complete.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?
Disney bought Pixar in 2006 (which is also how Jobs ended up on the Disney board).
Hmm, Score:3 Funny. I don't know if you meant that as humorous or not. I chuckled a bit that's for sure. Hey but as long as we're talking about vague logic, how about them Apple patents!
once more into the breach
According to Jonathan Schwartz, Steve Jobs told him "If you move forward to commercialize it, I'll just sue you." over the phone after Sun presented Looking Glass, a desktop concept similar to Mac OS X's....
I may not be a Mensa member but I think I may be smart enough to describe that as "Steve threatening to sue...."
(hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?)
You've got your order of execution backwards. Jobs didn't hold huge shares of Disney until after Disney bought into Pixar.
-mkb
... by not peddling software patents.
Any person with a technical background knows they are immoral and unethical, so you should not be using them unless you are defending yourself from somebody unscrupulous.
Wahhh!! I sank a company because Bill Gates and Steve Jobs threatened to sue me.. Wahhhh!!!! Grow up and grow a pair.
Personally I think all these CEO's need to grow up and realize all they are doing is hampering technology and the advancement of the human race.
"Adults" don't take wild-ass risks on pie-in-the-sky technologies. What I'm saying is, if Jobs wasn't the wing-nut that he is, he would never have got Apple going. Wozniak would have made his hobby computer, sold it in electronics magazines and right now there would be posts saying, "Hey, remember that Apple computer kit from the '70s, that was kind of neat! It was based on the 6502."
With others chiming in...kind of like how folks talk about that kit computer that I can't even remember.
Anyway, most entrepreneurs on the scale of Jobs, Ellison, Gates, etc... are head cases who couldn't work in corporate America even if they tried because they're just too out of the box. Corporate America wouldn't hire them or if they did, they wouldn't last. Which is a GOOD THING because corporate America has no imagination, thinks rigidly, and is more concerned with the status quo.
P.S, if any of you are entrepreneurs or inventors, leave corporate America - they'll just crush you and your ideas and you'll grow old and bitter always wondering "what if". In the meantime, the executives and the salespeople and the HR people go on with their over paid cushy jobs.
The idea that a company is being threatened with a single lawsuit is enough to cause a small panic in the stock price. Repeat this multiple times, and you'll have a company with an undervalued stock price. While you are correct that such actions happen all the time, it's appropriate for a CEO not to mention them, as a CEO is interested in increasing the stock price.
It is to Bill Gates. And that makes it a battle for everyone.
So Steve Jobs is some sort of hero because he wanted to save some money on lawyers and just make the threat in person?!?!? Man, you must REALLY be an Apple fanboy.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm not saying Steve is a wonderful guy. He's a business man running a business. Please explain to me what you think a business should do when they feel a competitor is infringing their patents. No, really. Let's be serious for a moment and boil it down to the core issue - what should a company do when they feel a competitor is infringing their patents? Now, if you give pretty much the only logical answer that anyone with a hint of business sense could possibly give, then the next question is "why should Apple act differently?" Seriously, why is it evil when Apple does what you would expect any company to do in a similar situation?
Oh yeah, that's right - because it's cool to hate Apple right now. If you want to hate Apple, find a legitimate reason to do so. This is not one of them. This is the CEO of a company on the outs spouting sour grapes. Boo hoo.
And, as someone else commented in another thread, if you think Sun sat on their patent portfolio and twiddled their thumbs idly, you're delusional.
Isn't not suing in the first place when you can even more respectful?
... children play by suing each other...
If Steve was showing respect, he wouldn't back it up with threats; you don't threaten a person you respect. In fact, you seldom offer advice to a person you respect, you ASK for advice from persons you respect.
He was also the CEO of BusinessObjects and led SAP BusinessObjects after the acquisition by SAP, until he resigned a few weeks ago.
Yes, it's more respectful. It's also bad business, especially in the realm of multi-billion dollar, multi-national corporations. People that make decisions like that don't run companies like that. In my opinion, he found the respectful middle ground while also making the right business decision for a man in his position.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both built hugely successful businesses. Schwartz was handed a hugely successful business, and he ran it into the ground. Why should anyone care what he has to say about people who did what he couldn't?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Apple once sued Microsoft on the theory that Windows infringed on the "look and feel" of Mac OS, so it's not at all surprising they would threaten to do the same to Sun over the look and feel of Looking Glass. It's just Apple being Apple, and Jobs being a dick, as usual.
Apple's litigious nature is one of the reasons I tend to avoid Apple products (I do have an iPod, but that's all).
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Having worked at numerous high tech companies and been on both sides of the litigation fence you come to realize, it is simply part of your business. Plain and simple. There are some rules like:
1) Never sue someone who doesn't have money unless they are a blatant rip off stealing your business.
2) You wait until they are making money. Then you walk in with your 3 foot stack of patents and say "We believe you are infringing all of these patents, pay up and cross license or we will file suit on each and every one." Then they usually follow with.." this week we are running a special, $15K/inch of height with a 2% on your revenue, AND we will throw in a set of Ginsu Knives" You in turn gag, renegotiate, build your own portfolio and look forward to the day 5 years from now when you can do the same to another competitor.
Like on the Soporano's "It's not personal.. its just businss"
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Am I stupid or is the sign in the article telling people to always park in front of the entrance?
It essentially says to never never never never park there and isn't a quadruple negative a positive? Furthermore if you never never do something then you always do it so it seems he permanently wants somebody blocking his door.
So, they made a single error (not releasing Solaris under the GPL 10 years earlier) and wound up losing one battle because of it. They did not lose the Java battle (although if Oracle does not pull it together, Java may yet be crushed by .NET) and they did not lose the OpenOffice.org/StarOffice battle (they do not have Microsoft's market share, but adoption of OpenOffice.org is certainly growing), and those two are probably much more important than Solaris, in the long run; had Sun realized this sooner, perhaps they would not have been taken over.
Palm trees and 8
And go to buy US Congressmen to pass athe necessary legislation to abolish software patents from the US for good.
If you are talking about physical devices or inventions, then fine, Apple should sue the socks of anybody that is using their ideas, but software patents are a patent abomination.
Does anyone else find the Oracle branding all over the Sun pages disturbing? They are also cancelling the Sun training programs, saying that you will have to sign up for Oracle Academy - at many times the price. In a nutshell, Oracle is acting as though Sun will be entirely dismantled, and cease to exist as an entity.
It may be time to move away from Java...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
And you find this behavior decent? Not acceptable (you obviously do) but decent.
Let me be the first to say: it's not business... it's just shit.
Everyone knows that :-)
I could be wrong, but wasn't Jobs associated with Pixar before Disney bought into PIxar?
Sun was in a dire situation already when Schwartz became CEO (that is why he became CEO: Doh!)
He tried many good ideas and at the very least restablished Sun's credibility with many people.
The OpenSolaris & Solaris in x86 is short of miraculous, also the OpenStorage intiatives are going to be the hardware foundation of Oracle's vertical strategy (they have made that perfectly clear now).
Yes. Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilms
I'm not saying Steve is a wonderful guy. He's a business man running a business. Please explain to me what you think a business should do when they feel a competitor is infringing their patents. No, really. Let's be serious for a moment and boil it down to the core issue - what should a company do when they feel a competitor is infringing their patents? Now, if you give pretty much the only logical answer that anyone with a hint of business sense could possibly give, then the next question is "why should Apple act differently?" Seriously, why is it evil when Apple does what you would expect any company to do in a similar situation?
Anyone with a hint of business sense would give the only logical answer possible: it depends. A real business person would ask themselves what are the pros and cons of suing? Is this real competition? Would I be spending millions of dollars to litigate something that we can win in the marketplace? Does the entity I want to sue have its own patents it can leverage against us? Would the benefits outweigh any negative publicity? Where would I have to sue them? Is this a company I want to stay on good terms with? Real business is not so cut and dried as you seem to think.
"See Nokia’s suit against Apple for a parallel example of frivolous litigation"
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Thanks be to Steve.
Isn't that also why no one is held accountable for a company's actions?
We should probably get around to changing that one of these days. -SOMEONE- has to be in charge in order to take the responsibility.
My comment was a reply to a comment asking why he could not reveal this information back when he was still a CEO.
I was only trying to say that CEO's are not able to do whatever they want (even if they do have a huge amount of authority in the company).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I think that Sun's handling of Java was one huge reason for Sun's downfall. The quirkiness of many Java programs gave the impression that Sun managers didn't know how to manage. That may have made it difficult to hire and keep good people.
It is far more likely that Apple knew they wouldn't win a lawsuit and hoped to scare a victory out of them instead. No one likes to be sued. It's bad for your reputation.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This punk just ruined one of the greate computer companies with OOOOOOOOpen Soooource "strategy". and now he will try to make living by throwing dirt around.
That isn't necessarily the only phone call some tech CEO can make to another one in the software world. Nothing stopping him from calling another one up and try to work out a plan to joint lobby the government to just get rid of stupid software patents, as in nullify all the existing ones and make it so no new ones can be ever granted, before the entire industry grinds to a halt, and the only innovation is in mutually suicidal and expensive lawyer's arguments in court. Because that's the end game, it's coming, you won't be able to write a single new line of code without violating some pre existing patent. It's probably pretty close now as it is.
The whole premise is bullshit. patents OR copyright, pick one, but not both. And if patents, where is the product warranty, like any other product, as in suitable for purpose, etc? We as consumers are getting royally hosed with that deal.
Time to get this snakeoil out of the industry before it destroys it. Get rid of software patents entirely, then there's no need for these "well, we will just nuke you harder back if you threatent to nuke us!" crap that is going on.
And that's how you explain it to shareholders when they start whining, you go "want us to be in the software business, or in the expensive lawsuit forever and a day business"?
Right, they totally failed.
That's why Java went into a tail spin and became the most widely used language in the world: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
Damn management failures, making the product so successful!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
What a hypocrite - Sun were suing NetApp over patents, and threatening others with them too.
Sun's patent portfolio was a key asset in the Oracle acquision - as mentioned several times.
Yet more proof that Schwartz is living in la-la land ? apparently only he does right.
Also - does he have any suggestions as to what OpenOffice users can do - if they don't have Sun's patent portfolio behind them, and why Sun chooses a license for OpenOffice that allows -only-them- (due to (C) assignment) to offer patent indemnity ?
Apple use off the shelf components, stuff that real innovative companies design and manufacturer to enable companies like apple to make their shiny toys.
I bet you also said Apple is evil for using proprietary parts.
BTW, what are your thoughts on the A4?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Did he buy it from Lucasfilms? From what I remember from The Pixar Story (2007) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/). Lucasfilms employed Ed Catmull who created the Pixar technology. Lucas got what he needed from it and told him that he couldn't invest any more into the technology and that he was free to take it and continue his work. (really amazing he did that). Ed then had the fortune of meeting John Lasseter and they in turn had the fortune of proposing the technology and their ideas to Steve Jobs. Jobs loved the concept and started writing checks. I really recommend that documentary to anyone who likes Pixar or 3D movie technology. It really is a fascinating story with a lot of happy endings for all involved.
Steve made that call because he hoped to prevent a competitor from releasing a product he was nervous about.
Why would he be nervous about yet another Desktop for Linux, when Eazel showed that Linux users don't want a new GUI? Heck, the fact that the Project Looking Glass is Open Source yet still dead without Sun pushing it should tell you something.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
A CEO does not leak information, they is the Chief Executive Officer, what they say goes until the board or shareholders, vote out the CEO decisions. What ever the CEO say as the CEO is a public announcement not a leak.
To ensure clarity any and all employees are honour bound to release any and all information that would be of public interest, with regard to fair and honest business practices as well as details affecting health and safety of staff and the public.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Yes, Steve Jobs bought it from Lucasfilms in 1986. From here:
Lasseter had been working for Lucasfilm for three years when company owner George Lucas decided to divest the computer division and concentrate solely on filmmaking. It was then that Jobs stepped in and bought the division to form Pixar. For the US$10 million (£6.3 million) sale price, Jobs got a core group of about 45 talented Lucasfilm people, including Lasseter's cadre of animators and technical virtuosos, as well as the rights to some of the Lucas technology.
I like the guy. I also liked Sun.
I repeat your comment which some bozo stupidly modded down.
"Disney bought Pixar in 2006 (which is also how Jobs ended up on the Disney board)."
And once again a dissenting opinion is modded down. Overrated and Troll, seriously mods ?
I tried modding you up (hence posting as AC) but it's no use. I regularly burn karma in these Apple topics myself for going against groupthink. Good on you for posting anyway.
How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve Jobs would be so unkind to them.
Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that McNealy and Schwartz thought they could play hard ball with Steve Jobs. They bet their company, and they lost.
The part of the story left out sheds light on this. Lighthouse Design went around buying up several software companies which made the most innovative and popular software packages on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and OpenStep, then sold the whole kit and caboodle to Sun, which promptly buried all of them.
Here's a brief and amusing summary of the career arcs of McNealy, Jobs, and Schwartz. I stumbled upon it while searching for a reference to the famous McNealy statement, "Sun puts all its wood behind one arrow", which he said when announcing Sun's support for OpenStep. Sun drove that arrow through the heart of OpenStep. Nice guys, Schwartz and McNealy, but hey, that's just business.
Regarding Concurrence, if there exist any patents relevant to the basic concept of a presentation package, those would undoubtedly be held by Microsoft (heard of PowerPoint?) not Sun/Lighthouse Design, and were cross-licensed to Apple years ago as part of a famous "bury the hatchet" move, when Jobs first returned to control of Apple. If Schwartz thought he had a leg to stand on, he might have sued Jobs. Frankly, this part of the story doesn't ring true. Silence on the other end of the phone when provoked in such a manner isn't exactly the style of Mr. Jobs, as you might have suspected since you're actively engaged in propagating rumors of his notorious alleged personality traits. If you're even close to right about that, doesn't it seem more likely that Mr. Schwartz blacked out, as a result of the brief and blunt tirade which he unleashed?
Observers had speculated for years, prior to the announcement of Keynote, that Steve Jobs used a presentation package on stage which appeared to be something other than Microsoft PowerPoint. Rumor at the time was that a special one-user license (with source) had been sold to Mr. Jobs, who despised PowerPoint. Presumably that license would have been sold by Sun, and Schwartz would have been aware of it.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
No, I don't "..obviously do" I never said it was either decent nor acceptable but it is how business is done. To not recognize the fact is to be incredibly stupid.
I don't behave that way nor condone it but I also realized quite early on that not being in a position of power to stop it I may as well stand on the beach and ask the tide to not come in. You want to go fight windmills, knock yourself out.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Which is why Steve Ballmer never said Microsoft's stock was overvalued Oh wait... he DID say that! May Ballmer just has more balls that Schwartz! (Although most women would prefer a bigger schwartz.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?
Because Disney owns Pixar?
Ok, I'm not sure you're in your right mind, what with all the broken English you're spouting [...]
Huh. AutoTroll's language-recognition text parser is broken again, I see. Anyone on that? We're Slashdot, after all; we demand only the best of trolls.
Oh, that's right, the stupid AI doesn't like to be ignored. Um... sure thing, 668936, we see allllll the broken English in that post. Sure we do. It's... um... horrible. Hey, anyone know any racial epithets I can throw in this case? I need to speak AutoTroll's self-compiled language to get through to it...
I didn't say that Java failed. My point is that people often questioned Sun's management of Java. The sloppy management of Java was intensely negative public relations. That developed an impression of Sun management that seemed to also be indicated by other examples of weak management.
Anyway, it is a fact that Sun has been a relative failure. The issue doesn't go away if you don't like my opinion. What are your ideas about Sun's failure?
Regarding Apple's lawsuit, I saw a clip of another interesting CEO and his take on stealing Apple's patented inventions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
http://www.talknerdy.org
I see it as Steve showing an industry colleague the respect they deserve and picking up the phone himself to make a personal, direct call to provide advance warning and give the other company the chance to remedy the problem before the lawyers are unleashed.
Picking up the phone is a hell of a lot cheaper than unleashing lawyers, so I think your "what a nice guy" is a bit unwarranted.
Seriously, I know it's cool to hate on Apple lately
Not Apple Hate, but hatred of the way rich people behave these days. Maybe I was naive in my young days, but it didn't seem like the rich were all sociopaths back then like it does now.
Of course, back then the young poor didn't walk around with their underwear showing and spouting obscenities in front of old ladies like they do now, so maybe today's rich are just being assholes like everyone else. They're just trying to fit in to society!
Free Martian Whores!
Note that the link you provided shows a graph. In 9 years, Java has gone consistently down from 27% to 17.5%.
I read the book. It seemed very fair.
I know, and we need to move away from that, but that is a different mess and this is only the tip of the iceberg of the harms of it. In fact, I did a lot of research about it BTW, and even did Slashdot/Reddit submissions about it. See my Firehose and my account with the same name on Reddit
I always enjoy the hypocrisy of people like Schwartz. It's Apple and Microsoft that made Sun unprofitable, not Schwartz. Sun had some pretty nasty, predatory business practices too, and loved to lock people into their big iron. I've seen companies jump ship to Microsoft, not because Microsoft was great, but because they were sick of Sun. Whether it was a smart move on the customers' part to do so yet remains to be seen (I guess not), but Sun drove away a lot of potential customers by being dogmatic and predatory.
On the other hand, some of the better choices Sun made: OpenSolaris, open source Java and StarOffice. While it's true that these products in themselves don't actually generate profit, they generate consulting opportunities. IBM doesn't seem to have a problem with this business model, but Sun certainly had one. Adopting a more knowledge-based company instead of hardware/software specialization would have been much better for Sun. After all, they supposedly know more about J2EE than anyone else out there, and there's a lot of J2EE consulting being done.
Overall, I can understand Schwartz's frustration. It's like he made decisions about open sourcing Java and StarOffice too late to capitalize on them. Certainly, Sun eventually made a lot of good decisions, and received very little reward for them. I hope that the influx of cash from Oracle makes the new company a viable competitor to Microsoft and IBM, and I hope Schwartz doesn't lose too much sleep over things. Sure, you can point the finger at Sun for a few bad decisions, but overall they were not rewarded for making good decisions as IBM has been.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
So that explains Apples "Mickey Mouse products".
I already outlined that, because software patents have an endgame which is no win for anyone concerned except IP lawyers and patent trolls. Just extrapolate it out in your mind for another decade. Keep in mind what sort of software stuff is being patented today, look at the tech headlines.
This is easy to predict. Look back ten years, see what was going on..look at today..now extrapolate some probable outcomes.
The old saying is painting yourself into a corner.
"So, they made a single error (not releasing Solaris under the GPL 10 years earlier) and wound up losing one battle because of it. "
Why would that have helped? All it would have done was drag Sun down even sooner. The GPL is good for knowledge, and it's good for ensuring that your code stays active and free, but it's horrible for making money. The companies that do it almost always find ways to make actually getting their software hard. Yeah, Apple likes to brag that most of their source code is open. Good luck actually turning it into a usuable operating system on your own. Same for Red Hat. Sure, here's the source code. Now compile it yourself, with no support. Dowloadable OS binaries? Oh, you're a funny guy.
The GPL-as-business-model is a largely utopian idea. Good for lots of smaller niche companies. Bad for any enterprise of a large size. Giving away your product doesn't make you any money. If you haven't learned that since the tech bubble burst, you never will. Red Hat has milked the support model about as far as it can go. This is why, if they wished, IBM or Apple could buy Red Hat with spare pocket change if they wanted to. And before anyone screams "But what about Google?", they're a service. Software, as we presently know it, is still a product. Again, good luck getting anyone to use an operating system that's supported by ads in the margins of the GUI.
Sun declined for a number of reasons. But one of the biggest reasons was Schwartz himself. When he was promoted to CEO, a collective "WTF?" was heard throughout Sun's HQ. Sun made some big mistakes... trying to compete on the low end, not investing enough to make SPARC competitive, not seeking a merger with the hardware side of Fujitsu... but hiring Schwartz was their biggest head scratcher of all. This is not a guy that will ever find employment as an executive at a significant company. Among tech executives, even Carly Fiorina shines in comparison.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Schwartz seemed to do OK with Lighthouse Design.
And his explanation for what caused Sun to fall apart over the last two years makes a good deal of sense... it was doing more or less fine, even growing from its dot-com-bust nadir until the financial crisis hit, and then nobody was buying new Sun iron.
Maybe if you have some details of how you think he ran Sun into the ground, you could share them.
Tweet, tweet.
"Same for Red Hat. Sure, here's the source code. Now compile it yourself, with no support."
http://www.centos.org/
"Red Hat has milked the support model about as far as it can go."
Which explains, of course, their continuous growth over the past 7 years, their profitable spread into the middleware market with JBoss, and their acquisition of dozens of smaller open source companies. Yes, the model is really starting to show cracks.
"This is why, if they wished, IBM or Apple could buy Red Hat with spare pocket change if they wanted to."
Red Hat is growing as a business. Sure, IBM or Apple could probably pull together the $5 billion it would take to buy out Red Hat, but that does not mean that Red Hat is a failing business or that their business model is flawed. It just means that they are not as big or old -- Apple had years of business before Red Hat was even conceived of, and IBM has had decades to grow into the giant it is today.
"Software, as we presently know it, is still a product."
Except that, unlike most products, software is trivial to copy, even for someone with no experience with computers. Software does not age; if software from 20 years ago is bad today, it is because it was just as bad back then. It is not a product the way a car is a product, or the way a bushel of apples is a product.
That is the reason that the open source development model is so successful for software -- because software is not like other "products." I can take some software and make a lot of copies of it, without spending a significant amount of money, time, or effort. When you find a way to do that with your car, we might see successful open source development of automobiles.
Red Hat takes advantage of the open source development model and has turned it into a very profitable business. Red Hat only hires a fraction of the number of developers that its competitors hire, but they have a lot of other people collaborating with them on their software. That is where the success comes from: Red Hat does not have to hire a developer to work on every single feature in RHEL or JBoss, because other companies and interested individuals collaborate with them. There is no need for Red Hat to pay every single Linux kernel developer, at least not with dollars and cents; there is just an understanding that Red Hat will put some effort in, just like everyone else, and everyone can use any other developer's work however they choose.
If Sun had GPL'ed Solaris, and followed the model they follow with OpenOffice.org/StarOffice, or the RHEL/Fedora model, they could have committed more resources to their more profitable ventures, without having to lose a solid and well established "product" in the mean time. Solaris was not really a big money maker toward the end, because like most proprietary Unixes, it was being killed by GNU/Linux (at least in the server rooms, where it mattered). They could have continued to sell support as part of their hardware support business, but without the added overhead of having to commit so many skilled developers to Solaris.
You should not discount the competitive advantage that GPLed code can bring, particularly when there is a large community of interested companies and individuals that are willing to cooperate on the software. OpenOffice.org would not be worth anyone's time if there was not a community working on it; same with Apache, GNU, Linux, or any of the other successful open source projects out there. The GPL does not just mean giving away code; it means getting code in return, often more than was given. That is how Red Hat works, and that is why they are able to focus their resources on support.
Palm trees and 8
Seriously... I hope they all eat each other alive so that open-source is the only reasonable way to produce software. I've seen too much greed and infighting over "Master of the Universe" status for too long.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
This and other forums are full of apologists who consider current law or state of affairs to be the end all. You suck! I hope you wilt and disappear! The lack of for lack of other words "moral fibre" is appaling
Thinking that current rules, regulations or general state of affairs have any value is damned stupid. Critisise it is you would a technical problem. Again You Suck!
I sense the fanboy is strong in you.
Apple is evil not because it re-sells consumer parts (screens, CPU's, HDD's) but because it re-sells consumer parts under false pretences. Namely that these are superior to the the same off the shelf components (complete with rigged benchmarks) and are advertised as "Apple(TM)" components not Intel or Samsung. Also requiring the graphics cards to run special firmware to prevent an identical, cheaper Leadtek graphics card from being used is pretty damn evil.
Dell and the like do not make any such pretences. Sticking a generic video card into a Dell will void my warranty but Dell do nothing to stop me.
I dislike the A4 for similar reason, it is a straight copy of an ARM A9 Cortex but being sold as an "Apple developed processor" (at least they had the common courtesy to license it rather then steal it). It does have a proprietary extension/component, given Apple's Modus Operandi this is presumably to prevent future versions of Apple operating system from running on non Apple hardware (al a the hackintosh but a generic ARM version). Whilst this is not illegal (my first example is borderline fraud) it is most definitely evil.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
We need to move away from the person being trusted with running a company being concerned with destroying the value of that company? I take it you aren't running any large firms yourself...
I sense the retard is strong in you. I was going to bother making a more coherent rebuttal, but the more I read your post, the more I realized you wouldn't have the cognitive capacity to understand it.
Thanks for being so laughably stupid, though. It was very entertaining to read your entitled opinions.
What about software makes it so that it shouldn't be patented? The only arguments I ever see boil down to "I WANT IT!!!"
Does anyone have an argument that doesn't come out to entitled whining? Is there a single logical way of stating this argument that doesn't involve the assumption that the world is entitled to share in the benefits of the work of everyone? If such an argument can be made, does it not apply to everything that is patentable? After all, it's not like inventing something in hardware is more clever than inventing something in software. Software is just easier to iterate.
Yes I always appreciated the bully saying "Give me your lunch money, nerd"
They're both bullies. Don't let your judgement be clouded by Jonathan's nerdy ponytail.
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Actually, they did lose the Java battle - hello .NET.
There was no OpenOffice battle to lose - it's never gotten off the ground ('hey, let's make the default format one that no-one uses!').
Their 'single error' was the one linux and apple have also made time and again - pretending that Windows doesn't exist, and it's around 15 years too late to do that. Hence they're all still niche desktop products.
There's so much here to deal with...
'Red Hat is growing as a business'
But their userbase isn't. Novell have bought Corel and a bunch of other companies - does that mean they're growing too?
'Software does not age'
Uh-huh. So I guess firewalls, spam, etc. which combined would destroy Win95 would do so simply because 95 was rubbish to begin with?
'Software is easy to copy'
Yeah, and assembler is easy to write. It's *installation* that you'll fall over on. Or will a non-computer person find cracking Win7 that easy? It's like saying a car is easy to steal as long as you don't drive it.
Open Source
You fail to deal with the cost of after-sales support, as well as increased costs for administration and total cost for mass-implementation. A good example is Active Directory - it's been around for 10 years, and yet for most of those years the Linux community spent more time complaining that 'it was only LDAP with bells on' while totally failing to provide an equivalent (or for a long while, integration). And now here we are, all having to use Windows/ AD because there simply is nothing else that will integrate systems so completely. So, if you *don't* use Windows, you can kiss goodbye to Single Sign-on, Enterprise encryption, Direct Access, Central Management, Federated Services...the list is quite long.
I also remember the knives coming out for RedHat when they dared to do something as revolutionary as automatic updating - and if something that simple can cause a furore, I'm not going to waste my time or business waiting for the OSS community to stop playing 'I have the best distro' when I can spend a lot less in terms of TCO and use what is almost the universal standard (as opposed to paying support staff twice as much to support an OS that has way less than 10% market share).
And Apple had 'years of business' - when they weren't sacking their CEO, buying their next OS off of him and then re-employing him anyway, *after* MS had bailed them out in order to preserve some pretence of competition.
No, I see OSS as having a lot, lot further to go before it's seen as real competition - and that's before we get to the desktop arena, where it has almost no chance at all.
"But their userbase isn't."
Actually, Red Hat's user base is growing, at least in terms of customers and support contracts.
"So I guess firewalls, spam, etc. which combined would destroy Win95 would do so simply because 95 was rubbish to begin with?"
Yes, that is exactly correct. Windows 95 was an improvement over 3.1, but that is not saying much and it certainly does not mean that it is "good software." On the other hand, there are places still running programs written 20 years ago, which have only seen bugfixes and ports to newer hardware; the software is just as good now as it was when it was first written.
"Or will a non-computer person find cracking Win7 that easy?"
The fact that it needs to be cracked is the result of Microsoft desperately fighting to stop people from copying software, and establish a mindset where copying software is difficult and illegal. A "non-computer person" could easily make a copy of Fedora -- all they would need is a blank DVD and a DVD burner, and maybe 10 seconds of searching the web. What is your point, exactly? That when software is designed to be hard to copy, it is hard to copy?
"You fail to deal with the cost of after-sales support, as well as increased costs for administration and total cost for mass-implementation."
Which has nothing to do with anything I said, but OK, I'll bite. What is the cost of after sales support for proprietary software, and where did you get the idea that it is lower than open source? Where did you get the idea that administration of open source systems comes with increased cost? Last I checked, it requires fewer IT pros to manage Linux servers than Windows servers, and those same Linux servers can handle a higher workload.
"A good example is Active Directory - it's been around for 10 years, and yet for most of those years the Linux community spent more time complaining that 'it was only LDAP with bells on' while totally failing to provide an equivalent"
Who failed to provide an equivalent? The only thing that was not provided was a GUI, and if that is your complaint, there is really no point in continuing.
"So, if you *don't* use Windows, you can kiss goodbye to Single Sign-on, Enterprise encryption, Direct Access, Central Management, Federated Services...the list is quite long."
The list is only long when you have no idea what you are talking about. You can get all of those things with RHEL or SLED, and had you taken the time to check, or at least ask Red Hat or Novell about it, you would have already known that.
"I also remember the knives coming out for RedHat when they dared to do something as revolutionary as automatic updating"
I do not, mostly because it was Mandrake who started it in the Linux world, and nobody was angry about it.
"And Apple had 'years of business' - when they weren't sacking their CEO, buying their next OS off of him and then re-employing him anyway, *after* MS had bailed them out in order to preserve some pretence of competition."
Apple also had a lot of time to establish itself as a brand and to become associated with a certain type of personal computer. Apple was always in a position to reclaim some market share, they just lacked the proper leadership to do so until Steve Jobs returned. All those years during the 80s and early 90s did a lot to establish Apple as a brand, and Red Hat is just not in the same position yet, not because of bad technology or a bad business model, but because they do not have enough years under their belt.
"No, I see OSS as having a lot, lot further to go before it's seen as real competition"
Seen by whom? Microsoft certainly invested a lot money fighting off open source, or have you forgotten "Get The Facts" and the Halloween documents, or the attack they made on the OLPC? SCO certainly saw Linux as a threat, as rightly so since Linux has been killing proprietary Unix for over a decade now. Who, exactly, is failing to see OSS as competitive, other than you?
Palm trees and 8
That is easy.
Because software is mathematics. You can not patent or couldn't patent mathematics. That is why software was and still is covered under copyright law and shouldn't be covered under patents.
Mathematics can not be invented or created only discovered. Software should be protected under copyright law so yes I a not in the all software should be free camp. But there is a HUGE difference between a patent and copyright.
With a copyright I can make a copy of the iPhones OS and sell it. I can not even left large segments of code from the OS.
But I can create an OS that works in much the same way by writing it from scratch.
With a patent I could write program for Linux and happen to write some code that works like some patent that I have never seen that some law firm bought say putting a shadow under a drop down menu and I put a shadow under a dialog. Then I get sued for a pile of CASH!
Patents for hardware and copyright for software.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The funny thing is... that his joke was actually hacker-funny, because he got the syntax right: Forth is *postfix*, not *backward infix*--the verbs go at the end (top) of the sentence (stack).
I could say that like this:
postfix Forth is infix backward Forth is not and sentence end verbs goto therefor
... but:
it (would; be; completely) {
lost(on, you);
}
Your joke, on the other hand... matches your UID.
-rozzin.
What do you mean?