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Sun's Scott McNealy's Days are Numbered?
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 20, 2006 10:19 AM
from the dibs-on-his-parking-spot dept.
from the dibs-on-his-parking-spot dept.
alek writes "The Wall Street Journal writes 'Dusk could be near for Sun's McNealy' where they conjecture that the founder and and CEO of Sun Microsystems might be leaving soon. They suggest that the return of former CFO Michael Lehman and and a more active Board pressing for improved performance could result in COO Jonathan Schwartz taking over the top job. We've heard stories like this for years but Scott has hung in there for a long time - his response to the WSJ was 'That rumor is about 22 years old and still chuggin.'"
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Developers: McNealy Created Millions of Jobs? 363 comments
cahiha writes "In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating
'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?"
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Sun's Scott McNealy's Days are Numbered?
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Sun's days Are Numbered (Score:2)
(http://religiousfreaks.com/)
One has to wonder if Sun is ripe for a takeover by the likes of Google. There is alot of speculation on this and it kinda makes sense. What's Sun's bread and butter these days?
http:religiousfreaks.com [religiousfreaks.com]McNealy, Ballmer, or Ellison (Score:1)
Why not? (Score:1)
Sun makes great hardware... (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, Sun has given a lot to OSS but they really need to stop sucking that dry Solaris tit while they slowly starve to death. It looks kinda funny when there is a full Linux teat right next to them and they wont fully embrace it.
Re:Sun makes great hardware... (Score:5, Insightful)
ZFS is a filesystem that can do raid5-like storage or mirrors. Filesystems can share a common storage pool. You can make snapshots instantly, and at any time you want you can roll back to that snapshot (transactions). Everything about it is very cool, check it out.
DTrace is also amazing. You can observe almost anything about a running program with negligable performance impact. It will break the information down for you statistically so you can tell that, for example, 1% of the time a given function call takes 1000 times longer than average.
It's also got containers and zones, and a service manager.
I have been using Linux and FreeBSD for a long time. I am just getting interested in Solaris, and I am very impressed.
McNealy is selling, what is this telling? (Score:3, Informative)
Date Insider Shares Type Transaction Value*
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chairman 2,400,000 Direct Option Exercise at $3.125 per share. $7,500,000
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chairman 2,400,000 Direct Sale at $4.30 - $4.37 per share. $10,404,0002
17-Feb-06 MCNEALY, SCOTT G.
Chief Executive Officer 2,400,000 Direct Planned Sale $10,344,0001
Get out while the gettin's good, take the money and run.
Sun is trading at $5 a share, time to buy? or forgeddaboudit!?
Re:McNealy is selling, what is this telling? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Now's the time to decide--earnings call is on Monday. There are some credible rumors floating around that this will be the first profitable quarter in years. Sun's really revamped their product line in the last 16 months (AMD, Niagara, etc.) and in their last 10-K they mentioned they were actually having a hard time meeting demand. (Apropos the original story, there's also speculation that this would be an ideal note for McNealy to end his career on.)
If they do end up back in the black, every analyst and his brother will be on CNBC Tuesday morning shouting "Turned the corner!" and I think it would cause some major institutional buyers to jump back in. Unlike the run-up last month which got subsequently iced due to profit taking, the big guys would be in it for the long haul, creating a new support. $5.50 or maybe even $6? I haven't done the math.
And I feel like this possiblity hasn't been fully capitalized in to the current price--I'm really surprised how little talk there is about SUNW on the boards, newswires, or the Street. A lot of people seem to have written it off as a sad relic of the dot-com era. I think they're missing out on two key points: 1) how revolutionary and unique these new UltraSparc T1s are, especially for those serving up huge amounts of online content (ie everyone) or who are worried about energy costs (ie everyone), and 2) how much brand equity "Sun Microsystems" carries among a whole generation of 25+ year old geeks who grew up worshipping that awesome UltraSparc workstation in the server room/lab/etc (like everyone at Google, for one.)
To the extent that it's even possible nowadays, I feel like SUNW has been slipping under the radar for the last couple months.
P.S. I am quite obviously long on this stock, so if course it's in my best interest to convince you of all this
Oh my. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://jonscocoa.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 13 2005, @06:12PM)
Replacing McNealy with Schwartz would be like performing a brain transplant in which a poorly functioning brain is replaced with a kidney.
Might not be bad, if its true? (Score:2, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday November 14 2005, @11:24AM)
Now, I'm no fanboy of either one, but McNealy is probably better suited to chair thier R&D or something than he is to being CEO these days. Schwartz at least would put a more energetic face on the company and (one could hope) re-vitalize thier core competancies.
Now, I know im dreaming, but maybe of McNealy got out of the top slot, Sun could/would FINALLY ditch thier 4000% margin policy and start selling crap that I (me personally, or the company I work for) could actually afford to buy!
Money men (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday January 12 2006, @10:28AM)
Just my 2 cents, but whatever you think of him Scott McNealy is a colourful and entertaining character in an industry of direly grey men. I'd be sorry to see him go, at least until he'd found a new home for Sun as it is hard to see how it can continue on its own for that much longer.
Has to be said... (Score:1)
(http://alfredo.octavio.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday January 14 2003, @06:35PM)
Well, of course McNealy's days are numbered... (Score:1)
(http://1-4-4.home.comcast.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 01 2006, @03:16PM)
I mean, he is, right? Can we get confirmation on this?
Hmmm... (Score:2)
As Mel Brooks would put it (Score:1)
Their management needs a lot of change (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/)
Their leaders are arrogant and resistant to change. That's a bad combination when you're in a competitive field where swallowing your pride and accomodating your users is the most important way of making money.
McNealy aside, rest of Sun is poorly executing (Score:3, Insightful)
- Tried to call Sun 4 times to get quotes for hardware and support contracts. Did not get hold of a human, phone system made me leave messages each time. No one ever returned my calls.
- All Sun's patches, and their treasure trove of support information, SunSolve, is behind a paid firewall now, and you need to buy a support contract to get access. See item above. Why not just a support subscription I can charge to my credit card. Zillions of people would probably pay $500 per year for that. I would, gladly.
- We bought several of the new X4100 boxes. Nicely designed, but serial console management did not work in Solaris 10 (or else required a fistful of undocumented hacks), and the LOM remote console was buggy and crashed a couple of times, requiring a system power cycle. We sent the servers back.
- It takes me twice as long to build any OSS on Solaris - no one is really developing on it consistently. Ever tried building Firefox on Solaris?
Basically, this is all execution. It's just easier to buy something other than a Sun. If need a Web server, I can have a Linux host installed and up from CDROM in 15 min, 45 min if I care about building the absolute latest version of Apache or an obscure Apache module.
Hu was that? (Score:2)
(http://danlipsy.tk/)
Scott never gives up (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.trinityventures.com/)
He never gives up.
It's very easy to armchair quarterback what Sun and Scott have been doing this past decade or so. Whenever I find myself wondering why my SUNW shares aren't worth a tenth of what I paid for them, I'm tempted to think of how I could run the company better than Scott. And then I realize that my puny mind can't come up with anything. The company generates cash, employs a lot of people and satisfies a lot of customers. Scott's never been afraid to remake the company (I lived through the transition from technical workstations to commercial servers and that was quite something), but there's only so much that you can do.
I have no clue what's going on inside the company now but, of one thing I'm sure: if Scott does step aside, it's because he thinks that it's the best thing for the company. He's given everything to it for over 20 years, and could easily have taken the "go lie on a beach" path years and years ago.
Look at them!!! Take a look!!! (Score:1)
These aren't two business people finishing a deal! These are comrades, even more THAT'S LOVE! Look at their eyes, how they look at each other, the smiles in their faces, incredible. There's hope for mankind, we're still able to really, really love each other.
Replacing Scotty would - of course - destroy this enormous love...
Oh my..., all these feelings...
Popular retirement candidates (Score:2)
(http://stable.cowoh.org/)
In the article it says "Mr. Stahlman wrote a research note about the possibility of a management change in early March." If I were him, I wouldn't be boasting about it.
"Dusk could be near". That's news with confidence.
It's official - Scott to step down as CEO (Score:2)