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."

Comments

Threat or Warning

[whisper_jeff]

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.

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.

Also, let's be real - what is Apple supposed to do? Sit back and let other companies infringe their patents? Apple isn't a patent troll. They actually spend massive amounts of money on R&D. They produce a broad range of products. They are exactly the sort of company that the patent system is intended to protect. If they don't use their patents to protect their investments then what is the point of patents.

Seriously, I know it's cool to hate on Apple lately but can we at least find reasons that have some vague basis in logic to hate them. Is it really so hard to find reasons to hate Apple that we have to make up reasons?

You're funny

[Anonymous Coward]

You're funny how much you just gush for Apple.

I enjoy it. Promise you'll never change.

Re:Gates and Jobs..

[Henriok]

Sun was pretty screwed after the dotcom bubble burst. He was put there to salvage the wreckage and I think he did a pretty good job too. What he failed to mention in his blog though is that Sun sued Microsoft in exactly the manner in which he criticizes Jobs and Gates. They sued MS for infringing on Java, won $20 million and then sued again which ended with a settlement out of court for $2 billion. Money that effectively patched the sinking ship that was Sun.

Pot, meet kettle

[mandelbr0t]

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.

Re:... and on Nokia

[Lars T.]

"See Apple's suit against HTC for a parallel example of frivolous litigation"

There fixed that for you. Now I know English is not your first language, so I'll be lenient on you.

Well, you must obviously have English as a first language to make up quotes. You just can't do that in any other language.

No wait:

Well, you must obviously hate Apple to make up quotes. You just can't do that if you are sane