Sun's Linux Exec Departs 167
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "The NY Times (free reg blah blah) has an article about the departure of Sun's no.2 exec, but also mentions that
Stephen DeWitt, the vice president of an important business unit that leads Sun's efforts with the Linux operating system, quietly left Sun
on Friday, the company confirmed today."" And the question is: How will this affect projects like OpenOffice release and the on-again, off-again McNealy Linux relationship.
Link??? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/02SU
The Register has related stories: (Score:4, Informative)
Zander to quit Sun in July [theregister.co.uk] (good bye, and good riddance)
Sun Linux boss quits [theregister.co.uk] (blah.)
Article (Score:2, Informative)
SAN FRANCISCO, May 1 -- Edward J. Zander, the gregarious executive who oversaw daily operations at Sun Microsystems [nytimes.com], plans to retire on July 1, the company said today.
Mr. Zander, the No. 2 executive at Sun, a troubled computer maker, is the fourth prominent executive there to announce a retirement in recent weeks. A fifth manager, Stephen DeWitt, the vice president of an important business unit that leads Sun's efforts with the Linux operating system, quietly left Sun on Friday, the company confirmed today.
Investors showed their disappointment with Mr. Zander's departure. The stock plunged $1.21, or 14.8 percent, to $6.97, a low not seen since 1998. Mr. Zander, who is 55, was credited by many analysts as the driving force behind Sun's rapid ascension before the Internet bubble burst.
Sun, which makes high-powered computers and software for networks, will not immediately replace Mr. Zander as president and chief operating officer. Instead, Scott G. McNealy, Sun's chairman and chief executive, said he would assume the role of president on July 1, the beginning of Sun's next fiscal year.
"You've literally had the top three executives outside of McNealy resign within two weeks," said A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. "It has to raise the same kinds of doubts that investors raised today among some customers."
Mr. Zander said he had decided to leave Sun last year but had wanted to wait until the company showed signs of emerging from a slump brought on by a slowdown in corporate spending and a sharp downturn in its main customer base, dot-coms.
In an interview, Mr. Zander, who joined Sun in 1987 from Apollo Computer, said his future plans were not set. But he did not rule out taking the helm of another company as early as next year. As it became clear that Mr. McNealy had no intention of leaving soon, Mr. Zander said, he realized that he would have to leave if he wanted to be a chief executive.
"That's not necessarily saying that I wanted to be C.E.O.," he said, "but I knew that Scott was going to be in control here. If I was going to experience something else in life, whatever that is, I had to move on, but I didn't want to move on until I felt the company was in a shape that was a lot better than a year ago."
In the last two weeks, three other top executives have announced their plans to leave the company on July 1. They include the chief financial officer, Michael E. Lehman; the executive vice president of Sun's computer systems business, John Shoemaker; and the head of Sun's enterprise services business, Larry Hambly.
Another executive, Mr. DeWitt, who resigned without a public announcement on Friday, had served as vice president of Sun's content delivery and edge computing division since Cobalt [nytimes.com], the company he had led as chief executive, was acquired by Sun in September 2000. He had been viewed as an up-and-comer within Sun and was featured prominently at the company's meeting for Wall Street analysts in February.
In a conference call with the company, some Wall Street analysts criticized Sun officials for stringing them along with four separate announcements of the retirements. They also expressed concern that other retirement announcements would soon follow -- a fear that Mr. McNealy did not dispel during the call.
Mr. McNealy said several executives had wanted to retire last year but had decided to stay on through the end of this fiscal year to help the company through "the rough patch."
"The fiscal year is the right time to go do this thing," Mr. McNealy said. "I know it looks like a flurry here, but I think it's been positive and planned out."
While Sun's fortunes are tied heavily to the overall economy and the return of corporate spending on information-technology systems, Mr. McNealy said that Sun was in better shape than it had been in the last two years. Its losses of $37 million for its fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, narrowed in spite of flat sales, and Sun said it expected to turn a profit in this quarter.
As the top field marshal for Mr. McNealy, Mr. Zander has been responsible for intensifying Sun's competition with International Business Machines in high-end computer systems that run networks and corporate data centers.
Laura Conigliaro, an analyst with Goldman, Sachs, said it was unclear how Sun would replace Mr. Zander's mixture of intelligence and deep understanding of the marketplace. Mr. Zander has been an effective foil for Mr. McNealy, the brash and visionary leader who sets Sun's strategy and has jousted on the public and legal stage with Microsoft [nytimes.com] for years.
"When you look around the computer industry, or even more broadly," she said, "it's hard to find the qualities that Ed Zander has brought to Sun."
Random NYT Login Generator (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=http://ww
Solaris Developer Comments on Linux (Score:5, Informative)
OK, I think I can handle this. Tell your friend that I used to work at SunSoft, in the kernel group, I did posix, ufs clustering, the sun source mgmt system, started 100baseT, architected the cluster product line (from which came vlans which I invented), etc. I think my credentials are probably enough to impress a sys admin
* the system call entry is a better design. All Unix systems other than Linux use the design done by Bell Labs 20 years ago and the Linux design is simply lighter - it approaches a procedure call in cost. The complaint is always that Linux can't possibly be supporting all the features, such as restartable system calls, if it is that fast. Those claims turn out to be false - Linux supports the same features, including security, as any commercial Unix. It's just designed better. And commercial Unices are starting to pick up the ideas.
* Linux kernel hacks count instructions and cache misses and eliminate them. This is a biggy. When each "feature" is added into a kernel, people will do gross measurement to show that it made no difference. And each feature doesn't make a measurable difference - one or two more cache misses in a code path won't show up. But do that a 100 times and all the "features" taken together start to hurt. Linux is far ahead of the rest of the world, including NT, in that Linus and the other senior kernel folks do not kid themselves that a cache miss here and there doesn't matter. I frequently see the Linux development effort keep working at it until the feature they are working on can not go faster because it is running at hardware speeds - there is no more room for optimization. Contrast that with the commercial approach of "well, it didn't slow down for me" and you can start to see how things get out of hand. Kudos to Linus, David and Alan for being the smartest coders in this regard. I'd like to be that good.
* Linux is a redesign. Many ideas have been rethought using current thinking. All other Unix implementations (exceptions are things like QNX - which also performs at Linux like speeds and has also been shown to be posix/xpg4 etc compliant) are basically the same under the covers. It isn't surprising that fresh minds can do better - one would hope that we have learned something in 20 years
http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_1_15
Re:If Sun was smart... (Score:3, Informative)
If the AMD Hammer can guarantee the same uptime that the UltraSPARC processors do, then you have a point, but, in general, there is more to a computer than just the CPU.
Re:But they now have Whitfield Diffie! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Infoworld coverage (Score:4, Informative)