Good to know there are smart people out there. SUN went downhill a number of years ago when McNealy was still jaw flapping about how badly Microsoft sucked and how the network was the computer and we'd make the world a better place. Then CPU failures helped crash a few thousand businesses...the dotcom bust came and well the rest is over $300,000 in 2002 money stock options down the tubes.
Oracle should have let SUN squander and then bought up the pieces at a garage sale.
Good to see these guys jump ship and make sure that JRuby lives on after the fact.
I wish them the best of luck and admire them for their chutzpah.
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
(Formerly SUN's WESTERN AREA AIC for StarCat/StarKitty)
1998-2002
People are missing they point. You're not replacing Steve. Nobody can. What you're doing is putting in someone who can run and lead Apple. The person Steve Jobs is, is unique. The next person coming in when that time comes will not have shoes or sneakers to fill. They'll be tasked with keeping a company on track and keeping the employees, the clients and the investors happy.
If they happen to have a spark of creativity in them that's a good thing. If they happen to be able to inspire people to a greater extension of their inner greateness..that's a good thing.
But to actually try and replace Steve...they broke that mold at 1 fitting and he's pretty freaking unique.
Michael
Am actually glad to see the transition. But one thing Jerry Yang should know and I would ask the next CEO to do (I know I would if the position comes to me) he's not Chief Yahoo anymore. In fact he's not welcome on company property any longer. You step down after driving the company into the ground, you're out. Time for new blood in the chair and at the boardroom table as well. New Board, New Leadership, New ideas, and new gains.
Employees FIRST, then CLIENTs, THEN INVESTORS. Yes it's a public company, but without the employees to run it you're screwed. Without the clients buying the products, you're screwed more, and without the investors to help move things along to support that vision with some cash...you're closed. You can please all of them, but it takes passion and vision. Two things that have been sadly lacking at Yahoo.
I challenge any incoming CEO candidate to match me: http://is.gd/82O7
I am ready to come in and make changes and turn the company around. All I need is the backing of the board and some others out there. Icahn are you reading this? If so...let's talk.
Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com former Apple CEO Candidate 1997
It's fun to read about the old days at PIXAR. Having been there during the making of Toy Story and the refinements in the software and the home built modeling systems that we used to create that movie, & the shorts such as Geri's Game, the Listerine Commercials, The lifesaver commercials and others.
Toy Story was cutting edge because it was the first FULL-LENGTH Computer Generated/Animated Motion Picture. There was work with fur in that movie that blew the minds of those in the industry and still to this day they marvel at things such as numbers of trees, water, smoke, etc. If you think about graphics and the rendering speeds of computers used then to make each frame of the movie and what's done today...there's so much more you can do today and will be able to do in 6 months.
Tron was cool for its time. For those of us who were there when they pulled the first video games off the truck and put them into the arcade following the movie, it was a bit weird to think about "what if this machine really does suck me inside of it?"
Hat's off to the pioneers and also to my friends at PIXAR who are doing even greater things then people thought possible and always will.
Michael Murdock, former Macintosh Systems Engineer at PIXAR 1991-1997
Actually, all kidding aside Steve does spend a lot of time reading and responding to emails. His exexcutive assistant (Andrea Nordemann) has been with him for many years and when she sees something like this come up will mention it to him just to see if he saw it. He then replies or delegates someone to handle it.
Example, I found a bug in OSX a while back, something that was purely aesthetic, but knowing how these things bugged him, I dropped him a line. (used to work at PIXAR and have had many emails back and forth with Steve). The next day I get an email from someone at Apple saying "Steve asked me to get in touch with you and talk about this". I thought "Oh sure, he read my email", and sure enough down below this guys email was an email from Steve complete with headers that simply said "Get in touch with Mike and get this resolved". The bug was fixed in the very next release of the OS.
You'd really be surprised about what he reads and what he doesn't. So when you have a problem just send it up the line and see what happens.
His email addresses are public knowledge by the way, just google "Steve Jobs email address" to find a couple of them.
Mike
Actually, I don't think that Jobs would go for this. But...he might. Never can tell what he's got on the mind nowadays. Intel/AMD not much difference in the software running on them, which is why Windows runs so well on either. It installs different patches for different OS's. It's not rocket science. Games run on Intel and they run on AMD. Who's to say that OSX won't run on AMD? have you tried it?
The fact that Apple/NeXT developed the OS that we now know and love as OSX and did it while everyone else was asleep at the wheel proves that they can keep a secret. do not be surprised to see OSX on AMD. Don't be surprised at all. It was proposed to JOBS and the CEO of AMD over 4 years ago by me. Long before Intel and Apple forged their deal.
It's another way of gaining Marketshare and putting Ballmer's Panties into a bundle. Gotta love that.
true. They could have done a number of things in the area of personal computing, but did not pursue that avenue at the time when it made sense to do it. Now there are a number of ideas that I have in that area, but I'm keeping them close to the belt at this time. You are correct though trimming the fat in a number of companies would be a good thing. I'd love to see a ceiling of some kind on salaries at a number of companies. Stock options...having them is wonderful, especially when the stock rises. A person can keep their salary low and still make a decent wage due to stock options.
There's a lot of things at SGI that need changing and I think the management team is one of them. Having the people they have now...cobwebs on the wall. Let's bring in some new life there, new vision and get this thing turned around.
I'm ready when they are, and all's it takes to get this ball rolling is a check to me for $125,000.00. In a year or less, I'll have that company turning a profit, or I'll quit.
MIke
and lack of Vision. Like a number of other companies, SGI lost all of those things and never regained them. They got cocky in an industry where you cannot rest on your laurels and slowed down when they should have taken the fast lane and branched from business machines into personal computers and reduced footprint server farms, among other things.
But they hired a new CEO and he claimed things were going to get better and that was in January 2006. It's now May and they file for Chapter 11 protections, when's the fire sale?
They need to restructure, retool, and come out of the gate flying like some of the simulators they've developed into a future that's bright and competition aware, but cooperative in verse. You don't have to always eat everyone else up, you can work side by side with them.
When I was at PIXAR, we used SGI machines on every animation station desktop to do modeling and preliminary renderings, then things were shipped off to the SUN farm to render. SGI was a staple in there for the longest time.
It would make for an interesting challenge to turn that company around, get the world excited about it and see it come back blazing a trail once again.
Still don't hear that phone ringing. Someone's going to give me an opportunity to prove myself sometime in one of these and they're going to wonder why they did not make the call until the bleeding was so profuse.
One of these days.
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
former Apple CEO Candidate 1997
(available to turn SGI around in 1 year, or less)
Well...it was funny to read through here and see my name in it. Thanks for the support. What a lot people don't realize is that what I wanted to do was to get Steve back in to lead Apple. That worked. That was a fun time.
If asked to come to Apple and work with them, I'd be honored. If asked to come and work with Sun, the same goes. Having been at both of those companies and to this day still exchanging emails with the top brass there, it'd be fun to have a hand in moving our industry to something more forward looking than what's currently out there.
Steve's at Apple still, a great thing for Apple. Scott McNealy is at Sun still, also a good thing, and I have a lot of respect for both of these men, and they know that.
My mission/vision now is merely to help companies see that which they don't see while locked inside the ever-loving-box. I see things on a daily basis which can be changed to improve revenue for both companies. All they have to do is ask me to consult with them, sign a contract, and drop a check into the bank and they can increase their streams of revenue substantially in a short amount of time.
As far as being CEO of either...that's not even being discussed. But don't think for one minute if Steve Jobs called and asked me to come in as his #1, that I would turn that offer down. Anyone that would turn it down would be a fool.
Look. Those of us who have been working on computers as long as I have know when it says BETA it means "TEST SOFTWARE". It means NOT FINAL RELEASE (although some RC's (Release Candidates have failed more than the BETAs), it means Not released for production work. So get over it. You did not read the fine print, or you moved forward and trashed files you were not supposed to. Most users go whilly-nilly into hard drive maintenance and have no idea what they're doing. I am personally thankful that those people exist as some have helped pay for some of the toys I enjoy today. Thanks for being there, but get over it. Don't blame Apple because you took their software...BETA SOFTWARE and installed it into your ONLY laptop without backing it up. That's your mistake, not Apple Computers.
I will however applaud one company for a beta version of software back in 1995 that allowed me to help rescue a movie known as TOY STORY while I worked for PIXAR. Symantec as they are now known, the software was Norton Utilities for Macintosh and a beta version of it helped me rebuild more than 27 hard drives containing the entire movie and all the final sound edits of that movie in time to ensure an ontime release as well as a single line movie credit for me as Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR.
But that was then and this is now and what Apple did release was a ground breaking piece of software that has received rave reviews because it does work. There are a few isolated cases...and they might include a warning to run a disk check on your drive before you install this, using disk utility to verify and repair problems, then backup, then do the installation, but knowing Mac users as I do, having fixed Macs since they shipped the first ones, they don't like to read directions.
So...if you did not read the directions and you installed this and it trashed your drive, before you point a finger at Apple, look in the mirror and see who the person was who did the installation...YOU DID.
Shrug your shoulders, and drag out that OSX install DVD, bite your tongue and reinstall your OS.
Then wait till the final release of the software comes out and be happy that Apple even took the first step in making this dream a reality.
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
docmurdock@gmail.com
(I really detest ***holes who hide behind anonymity because they're "career developers". BullSH*T!)
actually good luck to Steve and everyone there at the old place. I used to work for PIXAR in the old days (1991-1997) and played a part in making Toy Story. If the rumor is actually true that they're selling out to THE MOUSE, it's a sad day. Because when I was there we'd never sell out to Disney. It was about making quality movies with great characters and story, not about how much someone would pay for us. Pixar's a great company and the stock is worth twice that of what Disney's is trading for. Pixar can cut its own deal in the movie industry for distribution, so there has to be a higher purpose to this. Lasseter will not be happy with such a large crew. Because now you have train all the Disney flunkies how to make real movies like Nemo, Bug's Life and the others. Having helped them make Lion King, Beauty & The Beast, and really saving their butt on Aladdin (personally), I can say that they are inept at best in knowing how to use Renderman and the tools that Pixar has. It's a shame to see this happen and I only hope it's got an escape clause in there for the company that if things don't go well, they can back out. But knowing the House of The Mouse...that's not going to happen.
Of course the last time someone invited Steve to join their board (Amelio) they were out on their butt in about 4 months. So Iger...pack your freakin bags, because Jobs is coming home. Come on Steve!! Apple CEO, Pixar CEO, DISNEY CEO! I can see it now, a CEO-HAT-TRICK!
Michael Murdock
former Pixar Macintosh Systems Engineer - single line credit in Toy Story
All I can say to Steve is get a life. But to everyone else commenting on this story, the sucky part of it is that a majority of computer users are still using Microsoft Windows as their OS. That gives MS the upper hand. Until Google creates their own OS that runs apps that we can all use, we're basically hosed into running something that Microsoft on some level developed. Of course the OSX has something else to say about this as does Linux, and a few other variants. But the majority of apps run under Windows.
On the killing side, it'd be great for him to try, that way they can lock his sorry ass up and maybe sell off Microsoft to those of us who'd rather see it trashed than succeed anymore than it has.
Hey Steve, how much of the 65 BILLION that Gates has went to help the Katrina survivors?
I'll bet it's because you hate black people that he did not give over a billion. Cheap Bastard!
Amazing, Microsoft made all that money and it does not help as much as it could. In fact, if we calculated the amount of money businesses around the globe have lost due to Microsoft's crappy windows operating system and it's swiss cheese approach to engineering, it could probably surpass Bill Gates wealth by a factor of 10. The only reason I say that is daily businesses are losing money due to Microsoft. Daily.
So maybe Google should take out the hit on Ballmer, Gates, and a few others at MS.
Nah. waste of good energy. Focus on fixing problems at the local and state government levels.
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
Happy 10th Anniversary TOY STORY! (my name is in the credits of that movie) and R.I.P. Joe Ranft
is that no matter what they do, they cannot and will not ever catch frickin microsoft which has bound apps so tightly to the OS that they not only launch faster than the Macintosh, they out perform them 2:1 in most circumstances where it really counts. No matter what Steve shows onstage, there are those of us who really know that it's tweaked and not available to the general public. normally it's betaware that's then downrevved to not get the public too excited. I wish that they'd actually produce a fast computer and quit jerking off.
Slashdot Mirror
Good to know there are smart people out there. SUN went downhill a number of years ago when McNealy was still jaw flapping about how badly Microsoft sucked and how the network was the computer and we'd make the world a better place. Then CPU failures helped crash a few thousand businesses...the dotcom bust came and well the rest is over $300,000 in 2002 money stock options down the tubes. Oracle should have let SUN squander and then bought up the pieces at a garage sale. Good to see these guys jump ship and make sure that JRuby lives on after the fact. I wish them the best of luck and admire them for their chutzpah. Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com (Formerly SUN's WESTERN AREA AIC for StarCat/StarKitty) 1998-2002
People are missing they point. You're not replacing Steve. Nobody can. What you're doing is putting in someone who can run and lead Apple. The person Steve Jobs is, is unique. The next person coming in when that time comes will not have shoes or sneakers to fill. They'll be tasked with keeping a company on track and keeping the employees, the clients and the investors happy. If they happen to have a spark of creativity in them that's a good thing. If they happen to be able to inspire people to a greater extension of their inner greateness..that's a good thing. But to actually try and replace Steve...they broke that mold at 1 fitting and he's pretty freaking unique. Michael
Am actually glad to see the transition. But one thing Jerry Yang should know and I would ask the next CEO to do (I know I would if the position comes to me) he's not Chief Yahoo anymore. In fact he's not welcome on company property any longer. You step down after driving the company into the ground, you're out. Time for new blood in the chair and at the boardroom table as well. New Board, New Leadership, New ideas, and new gains.
Employees FIRST, then CLIENTs, THEN INVESTORS. Yes it's a public company, but without the employees to run it you're screwed. Without the clients buying the products, you're screwed more, and without the investors to help move things along to support that vision with some cash...you're closed. You can please all of them, but it takes passion and vision. Two things that have been sadly lacking at Yahoo.
I challenge any incoming CEO candidate to match me: http://is.gd/82O7
I am ready to come in and make changes and turn the company around. All I need is the backing of the board and some others out there. Icahn are you reading this? If so...let's talk.
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
former Apple CEO Candidate 1997
It's fun to read about the old days at PIXAR. Having been there during the making of Toy Story and the refinements in the software and the home built modeling systems that we used to create that movie, & the shorts such as Geri's Game, the Listerine Commercials, The lifesaver commercials and others.
Toy Story was cutting edge because it was the first FULL-LENGTH Computer Generated/Animated Motion Picture. There was work with fur in that movie that blew the minds of those in the industry and still to this day they marvel at things such as numbers of trees, water, smoke, etc. If you think about graphics and the rendering speeds of computers used then to make each frame of the movie and what's done today...there's so much more you can do today and will be able to do in 6 months.
Tron was cool for its time. For those of us who were there when they pulled the first video games off the truck and put them into the arcade following the movie, it was a bit weird to think about "what if this machine really does suck me inside of it?"
Hat's off to the pioneers and also to my friends at PIXAR who are doing even greater things then people thought possible and always will.
Michael Murdock, former Macintosh Systems Engineer at PIXAR 1991-1997
Actually, all kidding aside Steve does spend a lot of time reading and responding to emails. His exexcutive assistant (Andrea Nordemann) has been with him for many years and when she sees something like this come up will mention it to him just to see if he saw it. He then replies or delegates someone to handle it. Example, I found a bug in OSX a while back, something that was purely aesthetic, but knowing how these things bugged him, I dropped him a line. (used to work at PIXAR and have had many emails back and forth with Steve). The next day I get an email from someone at Apple saying "Steve asked me to get in touch with you and talk about this". I thought "Oh sure, he read my email", and sure enough down below this guys email was an email from Steve complete with headers that simply said "Get in touch with Mike and get this resolved". The bug was fixed in the very next release of the OS. You'd really be surprised about what he reads and what he doesn't. So when you have a problem just send it up the line and see what happens. His email addresses are public knowledge by the way, just google "Steve Jobs email address" to find a couple of them. Mike
Actually, I don't think that Jobs would go for this. But...he might. Never can tell what he's got on the mind nowadays. Intel/AMD not much difference in the software running on them, which is why Windows runs so well on either. It installs different patches for different OS's. It's not rocket science. Games run on Intel and they run on AMD. Who's to say that OSX won't run on AMD? have you tried it?
The fact that Apple/NeXT developed the OS that we now know and love as OSX and did it while everyone else was asleep at the wheel proves that they can keep a secret. do not be surprised to see OSX on AMD. Don't be surprised at all. It was proposed to JOBS and the CEO of AMD over 4 years ago by me. Long before Intel and Apple forged their deal.
It's another way of gaining Marketshare and putting Ballmer's Panties into a bundle. Gotta love that.
Michael Murdock
true. They could have done a number of things in the area of personal computing, but did not pursue that avenue at the time when it made sense to do it. Now there are a number of ideas that I have in that area, but I'm keeping them close to the belt at this time. You are correct though trimming the fat in a number of companies would be a good thing. I'd love to see a ceiling of some kind on salaries at a number of companies. Stock options...having them is wonderful, especially when the stock rises. A person can keep their salary low and still make a decent wage due to stock options. There's a lot of things at SGI that need changing and I think the management team is one of them. Having the people they have now...cobwebs on the wall. Let's bring in some new life there, new vision and get this thing turned around. I'm ready when they are, and all's it takes to get this ball rolling is a check to me for $125,000.00. In a year or less, I'll have that company turning a profit, or I'll quit. MIke
and lack of Vision. Like a number of other companies, SGI lost all of those things and never regained them. They got cocky in an industry where you cannot rest on your laurels and slowed down when they should have taken the fast lane and branched from business machines into personal computers and reduced footprint server farms, among other things. But they hired a new CEO and he claimed things were going to get better and that was in January 2006. It's now May and they file for Chapter 11 protections, when's the fire sale? They need to restructure, retool, and come out of the gate flying like some of the simulators they've developed into a future that's bright and competition aware, but cooperative in verse. You don't have to always eat everyone else up, you can work side by side with them. When I was at PIXAR, we used SGI machines on every animation station desktop to do modeling and preliminary renderings, then things were shipped off to the SUN farm to render. SGI was a staple in there for the longest time. It would make for an interesting challenge to turn that company around, get the world excited about it and see it come back blazing a trail once again. Still don't hear that phone ringing. Someone's going to give me an opportunity to prove myself sometime in one of these and they're going to wonder why they did not make the call until the bleeding was so profuse. One of these days. Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com former Apple CEO Candidate 1997 (available to turn SGI around in 1 year, or less)
Well...it was funny to read through here and see my name in it. Thanks for the support. What a lot people don't realize is that what I wanted to do was to get Steve back in to lead Apple. That worked. That was a fun time.
If asked to come to Apple and work with them, I'd be honored. If asked to come and work with Sun, the same goes. Having been at both of those companies and to this day still exchanging emails with the top brass there, it'd be fun to have a hand in moving our industry to something more forward looking than what's currently out there.
Steve's at Apple still, a great thing for Apple. Scott McNealy is at Sun still, also a good thing, and I have a lot of respect for both of these men, and they know that.
My mission/vision now is merely to help companies see that which they don't see while locked inside the ever-loving-box. I see things on a daily basis which can be changed to improve revenue for both companies. All they have to do is ask me to consult with them, sign a contract, and drop a check into the bank and they can increase their streams of revenue substantially in a short amount of time.
As far as being CEO of either...that's not even being discussed. But don't think for one minute if Steve Jobs called and asked me to come in as his #1, that I would turn that offer down. Anyone that would turn it down would be a fool.
Best,
Michael Murdock, CEO
DocMurdock.com
Look. Those of us who have been working on computers as long as I have know when it says BETA it means "TEST SOFTWARE". It means NOT FINAL RELEASE (although some RC's (Release Candidates have failed more than the BETAs), it means Not released for production work. So get over it. You did not read the fine print, or you moved forward and trashed files you were not supposed to. Most users go whilly-nilly into hard drive maintenance and have no idea what they're doing. I am personally thankful that those people exist as some have helped pay for some of the toys I enjoy today. Thanks for being there, but get over it. Don't blame Apple because you took their software...BETA SOFTWARE and installed it into your ONLY laptop without backing it up. That's your mistake, not Apple Computers. I will however applaud one company for a beta version of software back in 1995 that allowed me to help rescue a movie known as TOY STORY while I worked for PIXAR. Symantec as they are now known, the software was Norton Utilities for Macintosh and a beta version of it helped me rebuild more than 27 hard drives containing the entire movie and all the final sound edits of that movie in time to ensure an ontime release as well as a single line movie credit for me as Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR. But that was then and this is now and what Apple did release was a ground breaking piece of software that has received rave reviews because it does work. There are a few isolated cases...and they might include a warning to run a disk check on your drive before you install this, using disk utility to verify and repair problems, then backup, then do the installation, but knowing Mac users as I do, having fixed Macs since they shipped the first ones, they don't like to read directions. So...if you did not read the directions and you installed this and it trashed your drive, before you point a finger at Apple, look in the mirror and see who the person was who did the installation...YOU DID. Shrug your shoulders, and drag out that OSX install DVD, bite your tongue and reinstall your OS. Then wait till the final release of the software comes out and be happy that Apple even took the first step in making this dream a reality. Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com docmurdock@gmail.com (I really detest ***holes who hide behind anonymity because they're "career developers". BullSH*T!)
actually good luck to Steve and everyone there at the old place. I used to work for PIXAR in the old days (1991-1997) and played a part in making Toy Story. If the rumor is actually true that they're selling out to THE MOUSE, it's a sad day. Because when I was there we'd never sell out to Disney. It was about making quality movies with great characters and story, not about how much someone would pay for us. Pixar's a great company and the stock is worth twice that of what Disney's is trading for. Pixar can cut its own deal in the movie industry for distribution, so there has to be a higher purpose to this. Lasseter will not be happy with such a large crew. Because now you have train all the Disney flunkies how to make real movies like Nemo, Bug's Life and the others. Having helped them make Lion King, Beauty & The Beast, and really saving their butt on Aladdin (personally), I can say that they are inept at best in knowing how to use Renderman and the tools that Pixar has. It's a shame to see this happen and I only hope it's got an escape clause in there for the company that if things don't go well, they can back out. But knowing the House of The Mouse...that's not going to happen. Of course the last time someone invited Steve to join their board (Amelio) they were out on their butt in about 4 months. So Iger...pack your freakin bags, because Jobs is coming home. Come on Steve!! Apple CEO, Pixar CEO, DISNEY CEO! I can see it now, a CEO-HAT-TRICK! Michael Murdock former Pixar Macintosh Systems Engineer - single line credit in Toy Story
All I can say to Steve is get a life. But to everyone else commenting on this story, the sucky part of it is that a majority of computer users are still using Microsoft Windows as their OS. That gives MS the upper hand. Until Google creates their own OS that runs apps that we can all use, we're basically hosed into running something that Microsoft on some level developed. Of course the OSX has something else to say about this as does Linux, and a few other variants. But the majority of apps run under Windows. On the killing side, it'd be great for him to try, that way they can lock his sorry ass up and maybe sell off Microsoft to those of us who'd rather see it trashed than succeed anymore than it has. Hey Steve, how much of the 65 BILLION that Gates has went to help the Katrina survivors? I'll bet it's because you hate black people that he did not give over a billion. Cheap Bastard! Amazing, Microsoft made all that money and it does not help as much as it could. In fact, if we calculated the amount of money businesses around the globe have lost due to Microsoft's crappy windows operating system and it's swiss cheese approach to engineering, it could probably surpass Bill Gates wealth by a factor of 10. The only reason I say that is daily businesses are losing money due to Microsoft. Daily. So maybe Google should take out the hit on Ballmer, Gates, and a few others at MS. Nah. waste of good energy. Focus on fixing problems at the local and state government levels. Michael Murdock, CEO DocMurdock.com Happy 10th Anniversary TOY STORY! (my name is in the credits of that movie) and R.I.P. Joe Ranft
is that no matter what they do, they cannot and will not ever catch frickin microsoft which has bound apps so tightly to the OS that they not only launch faster than the Macintosh, they out perform them 2:1 in most circumstances where it really counts. No matter what Steve shows onstage, there are those of us who really know that it's tweaked and not available to the general public. normally it's betaware that's then downrevved to not get the public too excited. I wish that they'd actually produce a fast computer and quit jerking off.