McNealy on message (News.com)

Posted Jun 27, 2005 15:59 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

The 95% loss in stock price. The erosion of market share. The departure of practically every other exec worth their weight in salt. What does it take for the Sun board to terminate this guy? His sell-by date has long since past.

Posted Jun 27, 2005 16:53 UTC (Mon) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

"We are Sun. The Earth revolves around us."

Posted Jun 27, 2005 20:01 UTC (Mon) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link]

the surviving three operating systems will be Windows, Sun, and (maybe) Redhat.

(and he was quite willing to do a bare knuckles comparison against Redhat.)

just seems strange to me that 1) he wasn't ready to toe-to-toe against MS, a much fatter target, and 2) that he's so apparently clueless about the inroads of Linux (although I realize part of his business strategy is to identify Linux to Redhat target-wise) - entire industries and entire companies moving to Linux imho speak quite a bit about longitivity.

Posted Jun 27, 2005 21:14 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that
> word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space.

They want to own the word "share".

There's not a whole lot you can say in response to that, it pretty thoroughly mocks itself. The depth and profundity of "not getting it" expressed in that article are too much for words. Really.

I already ripped this interview apart in <a href=http://www.livejournal.com/users/landley/16752.html>>my blog</a> before I noticed LWN had picked it up.

Posted Jun 27, 2005 22:40 UTC (Mon) by Junior_Samples (guest, #26737) [Link]

Sun is surviving off of legacy accounts. Market share is slip sliding away. How many years left for Sun? Who knows. Five. Six. Maybe.

Solaris could well end up orphaned without any real commercial viability--yet another of the plethora of hobby-time operating systems.

Posted Jun 27, 2005 23:27 UTC (Mon) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link]

Other than the bubble around 1999,2000,2001, when success for dotcom companies like Sun was taken for granted, it seems about 15 years now that I have been hearing that the demise of Sun is imminent: they cannot compete with Intel processor speed (eg beige-box 486 vs SPARC IPC), with Windows NT, with Linux, they have no vision, inferior/stagnant technology, dwindling customer base... yet they still have money and cash flow, their stock price is as high as it was during their first 10 years and has been steady for the last 2+ years. To me it seems like Sun has made it through a difficult period of having to compete with higher performance hardware and is heading toward a period where they will be able to offer hardware and software which performs at least as well as market competitors, in addition to continuing their tradition of good product support. It seems to me that as long as individual CPU speeds are not going up, things are looking better and better for Sun, who has for a long time been betting on the need to scale up the number of processors rather than the speed of each processor. It is not clear to me what is going to be a better option in 2-3 years for 8+ processor systems than a Sun box running Solaris. I think Scott has done a pretty good job of adapting to the industry and utilizing the resources available to him.

Larry

Posted Jun 28, 2005 1:20 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

OK. I admit it. I have a sneaking admiriation for the guy. There, I said it! Back when everyone, and I mean everyone, including SGI, were on the Microsoft bandwagon, McNealy believed in Unix. He never waivered. Oh, he's a bag of hot air, to be sure. And he made the same mistake that all the other Unix vendors did, caring only about selling big servers, thinking that the desktop didn't matter, and letting MS waltz in and take over the desktop, realizing too late how important it was.

It seems to me that Sun is doing more things right lately. Open Sourcing Solaris is a significant move in the right direction. OK. It's not GPL, but does that really matter? The Solaris and Linux kernels are surely so different that cut and paste would never work anyway. It's the cross-pollination of *ideas* that really counts. They are the major contributors to Openoffice.org. The release of their Java stuff today counts, too.

McNealy is always ready to take more credit than is due. But I think that he is finally, reluctantly, coming around, in spite of some of the things he says.

Posted Jun 28, 2005 3:09 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

I still find Sun a very confusing company. On one hand, they went out of their way to do open source with OOo, GNOME etc. and now OpenSolaris (well, there it's more the case of half-open source :-). Anyhow, it seems to me that although this open source wing of the company is pushing forward with reform, there is the old school wing that wants to keep Java (i.e. JDK) closed source. So, the executives of the company have to defend this decision with illogical arguments in the same breath they've been singing praise to open source. Just doesn't make sense...

At the same time, Sun are half-heartedly pushing out Opteron based systems which simply don't have the quality, engineering and the range of similar HP offerings. At the same time, these same Opterons are killing their low-end Sparc volume, making the architecture more of an endagered species every day (i.e. lower volume means higher production cost, which means customers will have to pay more). It's not like Sparc is going into XBox, PS3 and Nintendo, so they can afford it. While knowing all this, Sun are committed to push Sparc... To what end?