Sun had a culture more like HP. Scott McNeeley was more like Bill & Dave. After the dot bomb implosion, Scott fought firing employees to the detriment of shareholders but I think he thought he was doing the right thing.
IBM like GE and some other NY state big corps are like a bunch of mobsters.
HP sucked while Carly ran it but she was an AT&T dialtone salesperson and another NJ AT&T/Lucent gangster. Lucent as she was leaving got nailed for inflating sales numbers.
That’s true — HP’s *old* culture was more like Sun’s. Now, I’m not so sure.
There should be a rule etched in stone somewhere: NEVER allow a liberal arts graduate to become the CEO of a company started by engineers. It has wrecked every single one of the instances where it has been tried. HP is one, Digital (DEC) is another example.
Yes, dittoes to what you say about IBM and east coast “mob” mentality. Except that Scott McNeeley was and is a big fan of brining in tons of H1-B engineers, so he’s not on my Christmas list either.
That H1B flood into Sun both hurt the engineering market, and I’ll bet my - ah, wait, I have nothing left to bet with - I’ll bet it had a lot to do with why SPARC lost its dominant position w.r.t. x86. Sun wasted TONS and time and money on projects like millennium that would have benefitted from a smaller but rock solid engineering team.