McNealy on message (News.com)

McNealy on message (News.com)

Posted Jun 28, 2005 1:20 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767)
Parent article: McNealy on message (News.com)

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.

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