McNealy Created Millions of Jobs? 363
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?"
I don't think so... (Score:2, Informative)
Despite so many online and network applications, many business users need to function offline.
Java is also quite a moot point nowadays. The write once run anywhere model maybe a factor on the server side; however, on the client side for enterprise customers simply not an issue. What enterprise customers run multiple client platforms successfully? Few and at what cost?
If anyone should be rewarded for providing millions of jobs for the world, it should be Bill Gates. Mock his OS all you want, nobody is perfect. But just take a look around and count the number of jobs directly affected by Microsoft products and compare that to those directly affected by Sun's.
-If software and hardware all worked perfectly, I'd be without a job.
Maybe . . . (Score:2, Informative)
He should be on everyone's Christmas card list!
Re:Credit for millions of jobs?? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say, in recent history, that Sir Tim Berners-Lee did the world a great favor by making HTML so easy to use and forgiving (i.e., not closing a tag doesn't cause the page to crash, unlike syntax errors in 'real' programming languages), then NCSA gets credit for making a great browser, then Marc and Jim deserve credit for stealing all that NCSA talent (and possibly some code) to make a really cool browser, and oh yeah, before I get too far, let's not forget Bob's Ethernet, and whoever made TCP/IP, and I guess we need to include K&R and everyone else who made UNIX, because that's what the Internet has mostly run on through its history. And as great as the network is, it's prety useless without nodes, and Bill Gates' *ahem* methods of popularizing DOS and then Windows has put ten times more nodes out there than all other contributors combined.
But some guy in the corner with a "vision" that just happens to align with what eventually occurred? Fuck him. If anything, that honor should go to Vannevar Bush [theatlantic.com], who, in 1945, had a pretty damn accurate vision of what computing would be like in the 1990s. Considering that he wrote this a year before ENIAC was unveiled, I think we can give him a pass on not predicting network storage.
(On page 4, look for 'memex.')
Re:Jonathan Schwartz is a hype meister (Score:2, Informative)
You mean like Java. What got Sun into trouble was Microsoft sabotaging Java on the desktop. Remember when they brought out an incompatible Microsoft Jave version. Wilfully breaking the write once run anywhere option. The one thing Java was supposed to do well. "McNealy launched a Microsoft and Linux-bashing propaganda campaign."
When someone launches a campaign to destroy your company and you comment on it how is that propaganda. His biggest mistake was in settling the long running court case.
a memo
Now we see Schwartz using the same hype tactics. It's a shame because I liked the old Sun. I really did. Will it return? I am not so sure anymore.
Are you seriously sugesting that Suns decline had nothing to do with Microsofts tactics.
Re:Credit for millions of jobs?? (Score:1, Informative)
If anyone should be thanked, it should be Bill Gates and Microsoft
Well, no. Microsoft didn't do anything for the Internet. A little Australian company called Trumpet Software produced Trumpet Winsock [trumpet.com.au] which allowed Windows machines to connect to the Internet, well before Microsoft ever cared about it.
Re:Keeping Java Closed (Score:3, Informative)
I absolutely agree that having conformant java specifications is a great thing, and is perhaps the single most important reason for Java's success. But I don't see why being open source should conflict with this - there should be no reason why an open source product should not have to pass the tests in order to be called 'Java'. In fact there is a current project, called 'Harmony', that intends to do exactly this. Open source need not permit 'embrace and extend'.
I can understand that there are potential problems with open sourcing Sun's implementation of Java - there are most likely huge amounts of code that involve patented techniques or are licensed from other sources.
I like open source (or at least having the source) because I have had to deal with problems in closed source products that won't be fixed by the vendor. I am not after re-selling the product, or re-distributing the source, but the possibility of patching something myself is pretty appealing.
Re:The real innovators (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Riding the Wave (Score:4, Informative)
But it was definitely those relatively innexpensive Sun workstation class machines that powered much of DNS, mail, FTP, and gopher, in the days before the Web, and for at least a couple of years after the Web.
I have to call Sun a *major* contributor. To the extent that we're perhaps 3-5 years further along than we would have been without them, though there's absolutely no way to verify that SWAG.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:they have lost control (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The real innovators (Score:3, Informative)
No. The people you owe that to is AT&T's lawyers. The reason why Unix became (pseudo) Open Source is that AT&T was a legislated monopoly. Part of their consent decree was that they couldn't go into markets outside of Telephones, and they couldn't supress technology.
This got them into a rather tight bind. When someone asked AT&T to send them a copy of Unix (so that they could use the chess program that was written on it), the lawyers tried to nix the sale complaining that they'd be sued for going outside the Unix market -- so they got sued for not releasing UNIX.
Having lost the lawsuit, they started selling UNIX systems and were promptly sued a second time -- this time for releasing UNIX. They also lost this second suit.
The lawyers looked at the seemingly conflicting decisions and found that, while they couldn't restrict the UNIX technology, neither could they market or support it.
Their solution was that -- for the appropriate price (depending on whether you were a university or company) and signing an interesting non-disclosure agreement, you got a tape dump of a running UNIX box (including source) and a hearty "good luck!". You could share source/fixes with other institutions who had a similar license (( which soon turned out to include just about every major university )), but not with that uninteresting portion of the universe known as "anybody else".
This managed to satisfy both lawsuits because they were now neither marketing/supporting UNIX nor keeping it closeted.
Thus it is that the pseudo-open-source nature of UNIX was a legal kludge, not a conscious plan on the part of Thompson, Ritchie or anybody else. I expect that, if AT&T had had their original way, they would have never released the source to UNIX -- and it would have thus remained a little-known, ill-supported niche system.