On the Record: Scott McNealy 335
Sequoia writes "There's a worthwhile interview with Sun CEO Scott McNealy at sfgate. I've always had a hard time seeing how Sun has any long-term staying power. I'm still skeptical, but I was able read why Scott thinks he can be successful, 'execution.' He sounds like a hitman! Like any good hitman, Scott seems uncomfortable with his feelings, or at least he doesn't want to talk about them. 'First of all, I don't get paid to feel.' Sure you do, dude. The best decisions come from the integration of feeling and thought. If feelings don't matter, you can by replaced by a computer. He does a beautiful job putting Dell in his place. 'Michael Dell is the greatest spare parts distributor out there. He'll get you a piston ring or a carburetor or a crank shaft at a really low cost.' But, uhhh, isn't that execution? Scott's international perspective is a breath of fresh air. 'Yes. So global companies grow globally. Shouldn't India be a little upset that we have most of their software programmers here?' Heh."
What the hell... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent is not a troll (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What the hell... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody said Slashdot had quality editorials :
This said, I agree: this particular article is exceedingly painful to read.
Re:What the hell... (Score:3, Funny)
Man, that IS funny. :-)
sun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:sun (Score:5, Funny)
Re:sun (Score:2, Funny)
[If you turn your head and squint, there's a profound analogy to Intellectual Property law in there.]
BIGGEST joke is on McNealy. (Score:2, Informative)
Neither Sun nor Dell gives a hoot about American employees. The OEM for Dell is Taiwanese companies, and Sun hires mainly H-1Bs from India or Taiwan.
Re:sun (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun's staying power (Score:3, Funny)
With that in mind, I've been eyeing their newest dual Xeons. Best of both worlds.
scott mcnealy (Score:4, Insightful)
"
A: To what kind?
Q: Industry standards.
A: What does industry standard mean? Define industry standard.
"
No wonder the other three founders are all gone.
Re:scott mcnealy (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, he was a bit defensive in the interview, but then again, which CEO wouldn't be? Did you expect him to say "Sorry, I realize we're fucked in the post-bubble economy"?
$5.7 billion in reserves is a good buffe, for them to change their strategy and get out of the funk.
Re:scott mcnealy (Score:2)
Agreed..
x86 is a standard in the same way that Herpes is a standard.
Re:scott mcnealy (Score:2)
Re:scott mcnealy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:scott mcnealy (Score:2)
It's not just that. He also manages to reduce capitalism down to a 2 paragraph summary and state that that's all there is to it. This interview shows that McNealy is an idealist with his blinders on. Take his opinions with a grain of salt, as he is not living in the real world.
-a
Worst. Story. Ever. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Worst. Story. Ever. (Score:2, Funny)
It's Called "Slashdot Warlording" (Score:2)
Slashdot Warlording would be an amusing thesis paper subject for someone trying to kill some sociology credits.
Who's the poster anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Executing on a business plan is called execution. It's a standard business expression, although a tad dot-commish. No need for retarded hitmen analogies
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is 'execution' a dot-com expression? (Score:2, Informative)
Hmmm... they sound kind of similar don't they. Maybe there is a reason for that. May be an executive executes things.
Execute -- To put into effect
Executive -- Of, relating to, capable of, or suited for carrying out or executing
Re:Why is 'execution' a dot-com expression? (Score:3, Interesting)
Business plan = Strategy
Execution = Tactics
The dot com's failed because they were mostly formed out of greed by untalented opportunists with an eye on getting rich.
Scott cares more about creating something real, products, employment, and true technology... something to which we geeks should show a little homage.
So if you are going to start a company, it's not your business plan that's g
ObSlashbot (Score:2)
You must be new here.
Not a hit-man, a football coach (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not a hit-man, a football coach (Score:4, Interesting)
But he is right about Dell being a distributor, not a manufacturer. I love when business mags publish stuff about what a great manufacturer Dell is. They manufacture _nothing_ except maybe Powerpoints and advertising material. Chances are, your Dell equipment was never even seen by a Dell employee.
This will eventually catch up to Dell because the company adds so little value. But that won't kill the Wintel standard. Only the death of MS can do that, and the hardware side would survive anyway. The death of Sun will kill Sun's stuff though. So comparing Dell's demise with Sun'S doesn't make a lot of sense.
Nealy is right about execution. Make a profit this quarter. Repeat. That is more important than "vision".
Re:Not a hit-man, a football coach (Score:2)
Except there are too many companies that make the mistake of only worrying about the next quarter, and forget about where they'll be standing in 2 or 5 years. That's what happened to a lot of the dot coms. They made a profit for the next quarter because the market was nuts. They lacked any way to make profits for the next few quarters after that - but neglected to put much effort into considerin
Re:Not a hit-man, a football coach (Score:2)
He's saying that Microsoft isn't evil because they write crappy software; they're evil because they aren't being punished by the market for it.
No. He's saying Microsoft is clearly a monopoly and that this proves it. He'd just said this:
"Market discipline is very aggressive, very strong and very precise in who it clobbers -- those who don't perform. The
Perfect execution of a stupid plan=? (!Profit) (Score:2)
Right, Coach. And if you never consider the possibility that you've got the wrong plan, you'll keep on trying to do the wrong thing more efficiently. You'll work
well, I read the whole article (Score:5, Insightful)
He sounds a little defensive, but that's understandable. He's been beat up over the last couple of years. Everyone's saying no-one needs Sun and it's a dinosaur. "All the talented people are leaving the company".
But they have over $5 billion in the bank and their line-up is really second to none. Dell can't match their highly tailored line-up. They've got a killer community in java and tons of other stuff coming out.
Sun's still useful for some things, and they got cash to burn. They have a marketplace and they have a line-up. What more do you want?
Re:well, I read the whole article (Score:3, Interesting)
Sun was great in its time, but their value proposition is rapidly vanishing. If McNeally spent more time running the company and less time honing his zingers, he would have a growing business instead of a shrinking one.
Re:well, I read the whole article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:well, I read the whole article (Score:3, Insightful)
"But they have over $5 billion in the bank..."
Granted the poster mentions other good qualities such as talent pool, etc., but if you have to lead in with how much they have in the bank, its never a good sign. Just because they have a lot of $$$ does not ne
So, he's a hit man... (Score:2)
More Information [66.199.135.127]
Dell and computers (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs made a similar crack when someone asked him to compare Apple to other computer makers like Dell and Compaq. He said something to the effect of, "Dell and Compaq are part of the distribution chain for Intel and Microsoft, like CompUSA is. They're not computer manufacturers like Apple or Sun."
What's a product? What's a solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
A "solution" is, well, something that actually satisifies all the customer's needs. Also known as a "system".
A "product" is something that a customer buys with a defined feature set and just does what the seller says that it does. Also known as a "box".
In McNealy's view of Sun's market, there are two ways to set up a data center or a big web site or whatever he's calling his market these days:
(1) Buy a "solution" from Sun which comes with hardware, software, service agreements, and a damn big price tag. Single-vendor integration all the way.
(2) Buy a bunch of "products" like x86 hardware + a Linux distro + a database and then hire some people to put it all together with in-house support. For example, Google.
What McNealy does not get about open source is that it lets us work on the "products" (kernel, gcc, apache, et cetera) and still let companies sell the integrated "solutions" (like IBM and Red Hat enterprise support). Sun's competition is not Dell; it is other complete "solution providers".
This whole argument is obscured by the fact that most people's experience with computers (including mine) is with personal computers; and for personal computers, Dell, Compaq, et al, do sell complete solutions.
Re:What's a product? What's a solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's a product? What's a solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's a product? What's a solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're shifting a commodity product. Classic economics: high-volume, low margin vs. low-volume high-margin, sure Sun don't sell many F15K's but they do sell a significant number of smaller boxes in the 8 to 24 CPU bracket. List price they make over 90% margin on every box they sell - as do HP and IBM. Simple, there's room for both. Dell are piggy-backing off of intel's R&D, Sun invest billions in R&D and recoup the investment over the longer term, on boxes which are as scalable as they are upgradable (with faster CPU's etc.) Sun Enterprise boxes, the 3000-6500 are still holding a amazing amount of their value 6 years after they came out, on a chassis which will accept 167MHz-400MHz CPUs. Just have a look on ebay.
Many problems can be solved by clustering cheap boxes together to achieve parallelism, some problems can't. Some customers need ultra reliable, 64bit big iron boxes with masses of storage. Many don't. Most slashdotters have never experienced high-end enterprise computing, a few have.
I've said it before, I'll say it again - the day Sun stop investing in SPARC/Solaris is the day I sell my stock - I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Re:What's a product? What's a solution? (Score:4, Insightful)
A head of lettuce: definitely a product. Not very useful to the customer until they combine and customize it with other products.
A ready-made salad in a clamshell dish with a plastic fork, plastic knife, napkin, and a pack of dressing: a lunch solution.
Some people go for the solution (especially when it comes from a restaurant rather than a grocery store); some people compose their own solutions from grocery store products.
Flour and yeast: products. Sliced bread: a solution. In this case, most people go for the turnkey "solution" most of the time.
Actually, "product" and "solution" are just crude categories here; there's actually a continuous scale from "grow the grain yourself" to "hot pizza $2 per slice".
But damn
Me, I'm happy to buy turnkey desktop and laptop computers, and then slap a turnkey Linux distro on them and start doing things.
There's nothing inherently good or bad about products versus solutions; it depends on the specifics of the products and the desires of the customers.
In other fields:
CD's and MP3's: very turnkey solution.
Sheet music and guitar tabs: nice raw product.
ftp.gnu.org: many fine products that do fine things
Debian CD: a solution for your personal computing needs
One interesting thing about open source is that there are legions of volunteer programmers working on products, and a complementary spectrum of for-profit companies (plus a few not-for-profit groups like Debian) offering solutions based on those products, and they are working out novel arrangements for mutual co-operation.
Re:Dell and computers (Score:2)
I bet Scott sees penguins in his nightmares...
The Indian Brain Drain. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Indian government has been concerned about the "brain drain" since 1990 or so. Atleast that's around the time they started acknowledging the fact that it was a serious problem.
The government puts in a lot of money into the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Regional Engineering Colleges. Tuition fees and on-campus living expenses are greatly subsidized for students who are admitted to these colleges based on national-level exams (like the IIT-JEE believed to be the toughest [educationtimes.com] exam at it's level in the world).
A large percentage of graduates from these colleges look for higher salaries and better jobs outside of India: in the US and Europe or Asia, and given the huge amount of resources that the government (and tax payers) pumped into their education, it naturally gets the jitters when students choose to work abroad.
The Indian government has lately taken to giving pep talks in colleges, in addition to distributing booklets explaning the effect of brain drain on the local economy.
I think brain-drain is essentially an outcome of globalization. Technology, irrespective of where it is developed benefits the world as a whole.
Re:The Indian Brain Drain. (Score:3, Funny)
H1-Bs unecessary. (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the problem. Programmer makes 80K a year. Boss thinks, "gee, I can hire a guest worker for 50K a year instead". So. Boss gets 30K more a year, guest workter gets $50K a year. And American
looses his job. Yes. World is technicly better off. But American workers are NOT better off. What's worse, the American worker paid for the road that that the foreign worker now drives to work and pays for the school that the foreign workers kids now go to. By the way, we're cutting back on Advanced Placement classes for more spending on English as a second language.
Few would say we need to cut out immigration all together; but the growth of immigration is out of control. Some people should be allowed in. But to massively expand the H1-B program just because the richest people in American want to pay less in wages in crazy. The few who do come in should have full rights as workers, including the right to change jobs easily, be on a citizship track and not be forced to pay lawyers lots of money to fill out complex paperwork.
You mention the Indian government's relationship to it's students. Yup, most are subsidized by the
government. Most Americans have student debt up to their eyeballs. It costs a lot of money to live in Silicon Valley. American workers deserve fair compenstation and not be targeted by special laws like the H1-B program.
Re:H1-Bs unecessary. (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree that the number of people coming in with decent paying jobs already guaranteed should be limited. I believe we should put no limit at all on the numbers, if they have minimum incomes that are higher than say, 80% of the population in the region of employment. That reduces downward pressure on wages and make sure that the immigrants are paying a good
Evidence that H-1Bs are Unnecessary. (Score:2, Informative)
Here is another example. Remember the SPARC64 by Fujitsu? It too beats the pants off the UltraSPARC III. Yet, in
Re:H1-Bs unecessary. (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, in your 2nd paragraph: yes, the American worker paid for the roads. But the H1-B workers don't have a get-out-of-jail-free card with respect to taxes. They pay just as much as native workers.
Next, it has not been my observation over the last 14 years of working in the industry that H1-B workers are being paid less than native workers. I'm sure it's true in a few cases, but if it were true overall, salaries in those jobs would be declining
Experience with H1-B's? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a wonderfully naive point of view that seems to be very common on Slashdot. While it might be true in some industries, it makes me think you don't have much experience with H1-B's at the higher levels of the tech industry. So I'm going on a rant....
<rant>
I was a manager at IBM for a couple of years, and in that time I think I hired two or three people on H1-B visas and helped one or two more apply for green cards. (With some overlap between the sets.) This was out of a group of abut a dozen people, so maybe a third of my team was on some sort of visa. The reasons had nothing to do with saving money or time. Instead, the reason was simple: a talent shortage.
My group and the others at our site were feeding off the top of the programmer food chain, to borrow an analogy. We needed engineers who knew the ins and outs of Java and/or C++, had a good grasp of OOD, and were able to figure out the details of standards documents and implement them, or even to help write them in the first place. Just as important, we needed people who were smart and could learn new technologies and languages quickly.
People like this were very hard to find at the height of the tech boom here in the Valley. When I was at IBM I and my group did a lot of interviewing, both on the phone and in person. It took up a lot of time. We got resumes from outside recruiters and we got a lot of transfer requests from other parts of the company. Even with all of those resumes, I still couldn't hire people as fast as I wanted to. Sure, there were lots of engineers available, but most of them just weren't that good. Truly talented "star" engineers are rare.
When I found a star, I did what it took to hire them, even if they weren't a US citizen. H1-B paperwork is a royal PITA, as is getting approval from umpteen levels of management. (If you're a really bad person, you come back in the next life as an immigration lawyer.) It also costs a lot of money to sponsor someone for an H1. I think it was around $5,000 when you added up the application fees, lawyer's fees and so on, but I can't remember. Then you have to do the green card a year or so later, and it costs even more and has more paperwork.
We definitely weren't saving money by hiring people on H1-B's. In addition to the legal fees and management time we spent on the visas, we were paying the H1 folks the same salaries we'd pay anyone else. Every few months we'd informally rank all the employees at the site and make sure the salaries lined up with the rankings, with absolutely no concern over visa status. The better, more productive engineers got paid more, period. There were definitely senior engineers who happened to be on H1's who got paid more than more junior (but still bright) engineers without much experience. I didn't see any correlation with visa status, except maybe that I never made any college hires of people on H1's. (It wouldn't have been worth the expense of flying them over here for an interview; the same thing applies to out-of-town junior-level US people.)
Many people think that market conditions have changed in the last few years and that H1s are now mostly obsolete. I think that may be true at some levels of the industry. But even with all the layoffs in the last couple of years, extremely bright "star" engineers are still hard to find. For an example, look at all the engineering openings at Google [google.com]. You'd think that in a down economy with lots of engineers out of work, they'd be able to hire people as quickly as they wanted to. If they wanted just anybody, that might be true. But they're also feeding off the top of the food chain; they only want
Rubish coward. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the US has some impressive institutions, leaders in the world. But all the others are pure mediocrity (and the syteme of majors and minors in University is a waste).
Educated foreign workers are required in the US because you don't have enough talented people and luckily for your economy and your society, your companies are willing to stand the quasi racist, protectionist barking in order to bring those workers to the US.
Re:H1-Bs unecessary. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Disclaimer: I'm not American.)
Why can't American accept 50K instead of 80K? If a foreigner in America can live on it then an American should certainly be able to.
The cost of living in the US has become disproportionately high compared with the rest of the world. People overseas who move to the US often
Brain Drain is indeed the result of globalisation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Brain Drain is indeed the result of globalisati (Score:2)
> the international market whose per capita income is 500 USD per year
Well, it's an unfortunate outcome of the continual agricultural battle between the US and Europe. They're constantly one-upping each other with protectionism or subsidies, meanwhile wreaking havoc with the "lesser" players.
Re:Brain Drain is indeed the result of globalisati (Score:3, Interesting)
At any rate, it's the worst form of protectionism, and it comes even more directly on the back of the US taxp
Re:The Indian Brain Drain. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Indian Brain Drain. (Score:3, Insightful)
> willing to work for less then maybe you need to evaluate your true worth
That would be true if it were a mostly level playing field. The fact is you're competing against a workforce on a payscale an order of magnitude lower than yours. There's no acceptable salary adjustment that can make this work. The lowest a single person in the US can earn and just barely scrape by is around $20K a year, and certainly not in all parts of the
A great Sunday read (Score:4, Interesting)
He's a CEO, not a governor in-the-running. I think his answers were suprisingly candid...and made for a good over read.
Dell's Spare Parts (Score:2, Insightful)
Sun won't die. (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, Sun and IBM might become a whole lot more similar in the years to come.
Currently they're both companies that have a lot of proprietary mid/high-end server and mainframe equipment out in the field with specialized engineers ready to maintain them. They both have a very large internal focus on research and information management (Sun has its own 'SunLibrary', Google for more information), and both are renowned for developing new technologies which are then "stolen" or "borrowed" by other companies.
Sun and IBM also do a lot of research and provide a lot to disciplines that run alongside their product line. For example, Sun did a lot of work with usability (that's where Jakob Nielsen came from), whereas IBM has done a lot of work on information retrieval and search engines (Google for 'ibm web fountain' [google.com]).
Even if Sun's main market dries up, replaced by Apple XServes and Linux clusters, this will be no more devastating to them as IBM losing out in the x86 market in the late 80's and early 90's.
Sun has a lot of brainpower, a lot of money, and partnerships (Oracle is the latest) to ensure that they'll continue for many years as a research and technology company, if not as a "consumer facing" company.
Re:Sun won't die. (Score:3, Informative)
What Linus said sometime ago (Score:2, Informative)
I did take that with grain of salt till I read this interview. I wouldn't want this guy to wash my car, let alone be CEO of Sun.
EDA Transition from Sun to Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EDA Transition from Sun to Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:EDA Transition from Sun to Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Expect to see more of that "buy a car, not it's parts" metaphor that Scott used...
Re:EDA Transition from Sun to Linux (Score:2, Informative)
I almost feel sorry for Sun because this is one market they are going to lose pretty quickly, unless they drop their prices by 90%.
We've set up an openmosix cluster and the linux native tools (Synplicity, ModelSim are two examples) migrate around the cluster very well so you don't have to be mindful of which machine you're running on.
We got a 3GHz machine and effectively gave everyone with a linux desktop
Huh? (Score:2)
How is this in any real way true?
More articles, less whimsical opinionated fluff.
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
'Feeling' does not necessarily mean emotion, it can also mean gut instinct, intuition, alogical value judgment and the like, all of which are useful abilities to have for a CEO. Computers can automate applied logic, but they can't convincingly simulate any of the above 'feeling' type abilities, which is why a computer wouldn't be a good replacement for a human CEO. Unless, of course, the human CEO was devoid of those abilities in the first place, which is what I think the above was getting at.
Sun sun sun... (Score:2)
Worst article summary ever. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, no, I didn't.
Hey Michael... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised you didn't mention other thoughts in your head, like whether or not you like twinkies.
Business Execution (Score:2)
If you're interested in what "Execution" means in a business sense, a couple of interesting books to read are Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't [amazon.com] and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done [amazon.com].
The former is an interesting outside-looking-in study of what happened to turn an ok company into a really successful company with sustained growth.
The latter is inside-looking-back on what it takes to lead a company that can get things done.
McNealy on Privacy (Score:4, Informative)
Re:McNealy on Privacy (Score:2)
Replaced by computer (Score:3, Insightful)
Leave the stinking rant out of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Leave the stinking rant out of the article (Score:2)
Re:Leave the stinking rant out of the article (Score:2)
Can we mod down the topic? (Score:2)
The initial poster's comments are rather childish--while this is a good article to discuss, did we really need to hear Sequoia's inane opinions glommed on to the topic?
McNealy says that SPARC is #1 computing architect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, McNealy is referring to #1 in the sense of #1 performance. Again, the #1 in performance is the triad: Power architecture (with implementations being Power4, Power4+, Power5), the Itanium architecture (with implementations being Itanium 2, 3, etc.), and the x86 architecture (with implementations being the Pentium 4, etc.). A quick review of the performance stats at SPEC [spec.org] should clarify any confusion. The SPARC is among the worst processors in terms of performance.
Below is the second key quote.
Compared to IBM, Sun is #1 -- in the sense that Sun has more H-1B employees. IBM, as a matter of corporate policy, refuses to hire any H-1B workers unless they are applying for a job that requires a Ph.D. The Power4, which handily beats the UltraSPARC III in performance, was built almost exclusively by American citizens or permanent residents. No H-1Bs.
Perhaps, McNealy was referring to the number of H-1Bs when he was talking about the SPARC being the supposed #1 computing architecture.
Re:McNealy says that SPARC is #1 64-bit architect. (Score:3, Informative)
So which is the #1 64 bit architecture out there? Well, PA-RISC and Alpha are systems which HP is trying to replace with Itaniums. Shame really, they were both very good systems. The Opteron is outse [theregister.co.uk]
Scott McNealy thinks the SCO case still has merit? (Score:2, Insightful)
This quote sounds like it came from an employee of SCO--not Sun! Is this not a restatement of Darl McBride's rip on IBM and all other GNU/Linux resellers/distributors? I thought Sun still contributing to GNOME and shipping some system running Linux--thus themselves being a GNU/Linux distributor. And if they aren't paying royalties then why has SCO praised Sun for doing so?
Re:Scott McNealy thinks the SCO case still has mer (Score:3, Funny)
"We own our entire software suite. We can do software indemnification. We don't pay any royalties."
This quote sounds like it came from an employee of SCO--not Sun!
No... SCO would say "We own *your* entire software suite.
-a
Interesting Interview (Score:2)
As PCs become more powerful and as storage becomes cheaper grid computing among offices will probably be way more efficient in the future. If you ne
This guy is amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
Simply amazing. Get REAL, Scott, come up with a valid VIABLE business plan and execute on it. With cheap mainstream 64 bit computing around the corner you gotta do better than you do these days and sell your crap at competitive prices.
slashdot on autopilot (Score:2)
this article was the most confusing read I've ever seen. the entire thing is in italics but only a third of it is relevant. the other 2 thirds is opinion of the submitter.
CmdrTaco, what the hell is going on? in the last year things on slashdot have really gone to hell. Normally I would shout down someone making a post like this but its gone too far.
We've seen numerous re-posts and even re-re-posts. the stories at times have been utterly ou
Re:slashdot on autopilot (Score:2)
you can't trust the guy (Score:5, Insightful)
That means, among other things, taking advantage of the SCO situation by telling people to buy Linux or Solaris from Sun so that they can't get sued by SCO.
And you can see his current thinking in this quote: Note the "we have", as in "Sun has". The guy obviously views Sun's ownership of Java as analogous to Microsoft's ownership of
Linux or POSIX don't even enter into his thinking as platforms. He already thinks of the Linux and POSIX APIs as being irrelevant, supplanted by Java APIs, APIs that, by his own statement, Sun effectively owns.
At least with Gates, people know exactly where he stands. McNealy is dangerous because some people actually believe his talk of openness and support of free software. But make no mistake: if it would help his business, the guy would clearly not hesitate a second to kill Linux or grab control of it. And that's just what he is trying to do, both with Java and with his SCO-related efforts.
In A Word: Wrong (Score:2)
When emotions enter the equation of making critical decisions, 9 times out of 10, you will make a poor decision (that other time you were just damn lucky).
Its a good thing good (successful) military commanders don't follow this highly flawed philosophy of using "feelings" to make decisions.
You use experience, wisdom, logic and analysis to make good decisions. Feelings and emotions are best left at the door.
Thanks for your feedback (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously Sun has accomplished a lot. It's an extremely successful business. DEC was another extremely successful business. 'Staying power' may not be important, or even desireable in today's economy.
Still, it's sad to see how people as capable as Scott McNealy can be so preoccupied with hubris. In the interview he says, 'We need to be more aligned in terms of skill sets and we've got that with the new team. We've got exactly who I wanted in there to run the joint.' That's nice, but the shareholders may not want 'yes men' and 'yes women'.
Cheers!
How socialist California oppresses Scott McNealy (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, you poor oppressed prick; at least you didn't have to wear a bustier and French kiss Madonna.
Re:Uh (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
(and Japan, Europe, and 100+ other countries we have troops in for no goddamn reason)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
Re:Uh (Score:2)
considering that obl's lesser rationalisation resulted in four downed airliners, several demolished buildings (including wtc 1 & 2), severe damage to several more (including the pentagon) and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.
Re:Uh (Score:2)
i like the mature foreign policy. glad i left.
Re:Uh (Score:2)
Since the US has invaded Iraq, that would mean that you believe Iraq was somehow behind or supported 9/11.
If you believe that, you should be able to show why you believe such a strange thing.
Also, you would be calling the US administration liars, since that was not the stated reason for the invasion. Or if it was, it was one of many.
Re:WTF does this have to do with Sun? (Score:2)
uh, i made a snarky comment to a person about defending their job. i didn't even mention bush. is bush responsible for the policy of pre-emptive invasion to protect the national interest? are american jobs in the national interest?
i don't see how stubbing your toe would be bush's fault. at least not now. after a few years of his voluntary environmental policy you might have a hard time seeing the stairs through the haze of pollution, but by then you'll probably live in a
Re:What Sun forgets (Score:2, Funny)
1. No it's not.
2. "Extincted" is not a word.
3. No it's not.
Re:What Sun forgets (Score:3, Interesting)
rsync moves files -- it synchronizes 2 file systems (or directories) that are separated logically or geographically. You can't compare this to a Sun Ray that automagically makes your exact desktop and env appear anywhere you want it to be in seconds (and it's the same copy, not a duplicate) wit
Re:Is it hard to sleep.. (Score:2)
Sounds like CEO hand-waving bullshit. He thinks it makes him sound smart. Vision and execution. Simply put, you have to eyes that see what's coming (vision), and you have to have hands that can put things on top of other things (execution).
Exactly when would either one these not be important? Saying that there was a time when you needed one, but not so much the other, is just stupid.