Sun's Scott McNealy's Days are Numbered?

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.'"

McNealy is selling, what is this telling?

[digitaldc]

INSIDER & RULE 144 TRANSACTIONS REPORTED - LAST TWO YEARS [yahoo.com]
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?

[DustyShadow]

Nothing looks shady to me about that. All he did was sell 2,400,000 shares and then rebuy that same amount at his option price. Happens all the time. Check out almost any company and you will see the same thing happening on a regular basis.

Re:Sun makes great hardware...

[htd2]

Sun are unlikely to drop Solaris, it is and for the most part always has been their crown jewels.

It would be difficult to find a OS that on a capability by capability approaches Solaris as a server platform. dtrace, SMF, zones, fireengine, great scalability, good enough HCL.

However I can understand a Linux advocate wanting Sun to drop Solaris, it is the closest and best competitor to Linux.

A large number of big commercial companies that were early adopters of Linux are now looking long and hard at Solaris x86. Its fast, cheaper than Linux, OpenSource if they want to tick that box and it runs on pretty much all the hardware that they deployed Linux on.

Some have jumped allready.

Re:Sun makes great hardware...

[JPriest]

People tend to think Linux is free like beer for the Enterprize market also, but in reality it is hardly feee [redhat.com]. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS starts at $1499.

But to play devils advocate for a bit, the free like beer "download editions" for most Linux distros have left a larger market of Linux admins to hire from. We are a mixed shop but most of the "new" guys into out Linux/UNIX deparment tend to prefer Linux becasue that is what they know. Everytime we lose an old Solaris guy, we get a new Linux guy. I don't think the days ahead are going to get any easier for Sun.

Re:Sun makes great hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but Solaris tit is full of yummy highly-optimized formula. And we've grown quite strong on that milk. And BTW, Solaris is now developing at a much faster rate than Linux.

If you'd also like some of that milk superformula, you can find it at opensolaris.org. Especially where it says "putback logs" -- that's the milk glands.