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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.
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?
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
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?
"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
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.
Well, what do you expect from a competitor?
To release a better, or cheaper product.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
Everyone knows that :-)
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.
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.
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!
"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
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.
"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