Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs 241
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CmdrTaco
from the why-is-there-no-extra dept.
from the why-is-there-no-extra dept.
alphadogg writes "Former CEO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz has taken to his personal blog, provocatively titled 'What I couldn't say ...,' to dish some industry dirt and tell his side of the story about the demise of Sun. He has already hinted at plans to write a book, and a new post suggests a tell-all tome could indeed be in the offing. 'I feel for Google — Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too,' Schwartz writes, apparently referring to Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC, which makes Google's Nexus One smartphone. As for Bill Gates, Schwartz says he was threatening regarding Sun's efforts in the office software space."
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironic, if perhaps appropriate, that the technology behind is current blog is (among other reasons) the reason that his current occupation is "blogger"...
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently not: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com [netcraft.com]
I appreciate the insight from Schwartz but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/ [sun.com]. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html [netapp.com]
Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:5, Interesting)
Book about Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
The book was written by Jennifer Edstrom, the daughter of Pam Edstrom, manager of Microsoft's P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom, and a former Microsoft manager. The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..."
The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It's certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft's P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft's abusiveness in detail.
Grow Up@ (Score:4, Interesting)
"Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
I personally think it all of this suing is petty and dumb. This reminds me of when I was about 10 and when my little cousin would always say "I'll sue you" whenever he didn't get his way. Personally I think all these CEO's need to grow up and realize all they are doing is hampering technology and the advancement of the human race.
Obviously just the start of the story (Score:2, Interesting)
Glad to hear that he sees this as the major post-leaving issue to raise. I think that's pretty significant in itself.
Hopefully this brief blog entry is just a teaser. It really is hard to draw a clear line between trolls [swpat.org], inter-company attacks [swpat.org], tax seekers [swpat.org].
Re:Threat or Warning (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you understand how big an undertaking litigation is. Steve made that call because he hoped to prevent a competitor from releasing a product he was nervous about. Respect had absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if he thought he would win (and Steve is neither a lawyer nor a GUI developer so he has no special insight into whether he would), lawsuits are expensive.
Now, I know that flies in the face of the oh-so-cool "Apple is teh evil!" that is all the rage lately but, seriously, can we get some perspective. Steve himself made a call. He didn't pawn it off on an underling. He showed his industry colleague the respect they deserve by making the call himself. He gave advance warning. He let the other company decide whether to take their chances or change their plans. He gave them the power to determine their fate. Sounds pretty respectful to me.
I find it fascinating that you and people like you will not be swayed by three decades of firsthand accounts as to how Jobs treats people, not only competitors but employees and business partners. Why are you so desperate to paint Jobs as anything other than a narcissist? I can understand you love Apple, but why do you extend that love to the CEO too? Can't you really like a movie without also idolizing the president of the production company? My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence - do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:1, Interesting)
hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?
Disney bought Pixar in 2006 (which is also how Jobs ended up on the Disney board).
Re:Valuable Java Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure most of the patents are in the virutal machine technology like HotSpot and various APIs that are used on the Java platform (like how he mentions Kodak suing over RMI in the article).
Java has checked and unchecked exceptions (Exception vs RuntimeException), so the developer gets to choose how strict to be with parts of their API. Type Erasure can be annoying but it's fairly clever for maintaining backwards compatibility and the end results are much faster than "true generics" found in other platforms.
Re:Threat or Warning (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh yeah, that's right - because it's cool to hate Apple right now. If you want to hate Apple, find a legitimate reason to do so. This is not one of them. This is the CEO of a company on the outs spouting sour grapes. Boo hoo.
And, as someone else commented in another thread, if you think Sun sat on their patent portfolio and twiddled their thumbs idly, you're delusional.
Re:Sun had 20 years, and still lost the OS battle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:2, Interesting)
Did he buy it from Lucasfilms? From what I remember from The Pixar Story (2007) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/). Lucasfilms employed Ed Catmull who created the Pixar technology. Lucas got what he needed from it and told him that he couldn't invest any more into the technology and that he was free to take it and continue his work. (really amazing he did that). Ed then had the fortune of meeting John Lasseter and they in turn had the fortune of proposing the technology and their ideas to Steve Jobs. Jobs loved the concept and started writing checks. I really recommend that documentary to anyone who likes Pixar or 3D movie technology. It really is a fascinating story with a lot of happy endings for all involved.
business is brutal (Score:3, Interesting)
How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve Jobs would be so unkind to them.
Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that McNealy and Schwartz thought they could play hard ball with Steve Jobs. They bet their company, and they lost.
The part of the story left out sheds light on this. Lighthouse Design [wikipedia.org] went around buying up several software companies which made the most innovative and popular software packages on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP [wikipedia.org] and OpenStep [wikipedia.org], then sold the whole kit and caboodle to Sun, which promptly buried all of them.
Here's a brief and amusing summary of the career arcs [omnigroup.com] of McNealy, Jobs, and Schwartz. I stumbled upon it while searching for a reference to the famous McNealy statement, "Sun puts all its wood behind one arrow", which he said when announcing Sun's support for OpenStep. Sun drove that arrow through the heart of OpenStep. Nice guys, Schwartz and McNealy, but hey, that's just business.
Regarding Concurrence, if there exist any patents relevant to the basic concept of a presentation package, those would undoubtedly be held by Microsoft (heard of PowerPoint?) not Sun/Lighthouse Design, and were cross-licensed to Apple years ago as part of a famous "bury the hatchet" move, when Jobs first returned to control of Apple. If Schwartz thought he had a leg to stand on, he might have sued Jobs. Frankly, this part of the story doesn't ring true. Silence on the other end of the phone when provoked in such a manner isn't exactly the style of Mr. Jobs, as you might have suspected since you're actively engaged in propagating rumors of his notorious alleged personality traits. If you're even close to right about that, doesn't it seem more likely that Mr. Schwartz blacked out, as a result of the brief and blunt tirade which he unleashed?
Observers had speculated for years, prior to the announcement of Keynote, that Steve Jobs used a presentation package on stage which appeared to be something other than Microsoft PowerPoint. Rumor at the time was that a special one-user license (with source) had been sold to Mr. Jobs, who despised PowerPoint. Presumably that license would have been sold by Sun, and Schwartz would have been aware of it.