Posted on 04/24/2006 4:54:33 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy has stepped down as chief executive, and has been replaced by President Jonathan Schwartz, the company said Monday.McNealy, who will remain as chairman, was one of four co-founders of Sun 24 years ago and has been CEO for the last 22 of those. Since then, he has been a strong and often contrarian voice for change in the computing industry, but in recent years his vision hasn't translated into financial success.
"Jonathan has risen to the top of the class, and he is ready," McNealy said in a conference call. The move was planned, he added: "It's part of our ongoing succession process we've been working on since my days at the (General Electric) board."
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
Not a big surprise. McNealy is a dinosaur, and Sun never learned to survive post bubble.
What is the purpose of Sun Microsystems?
They started out in the mid-80s building powerful desktop, "workstations".
In the 90's they were successful building expensive internet servers. Cheap LINUX servers and Dell-type servers were the kiss of death to them in the post-bubble world.
The purpose of Sun is cheap reliable Unix servers.
Bucktoothed McNealy has been out of touch with the realities of the server biz for 6 years. This resignation is 6 years too late. Sun cannot be saved.
you wouldn't ask that if you had any idea how much key infrastructure in this country, both commerical and government/military, their servers run.
I cut my teeth on Digitals and DECs, but enjoyed working with SUNs most of all. There are definitely a sloughful of them out there..
As close as I can figure, they kept the HVAC guys employeed, along with the utility company guys. A sparc 5 with monitor consumed about 2.5KW.
Good OS, good hardware, they really needed a power guy in the loop. And they needed to figure out their place in the market.
/johnny (SunOS and Solaris certified, by Sun)
That's my recollection also. They made super-fast workstations that could do three-dimensional graphics, structural and fluid dynamics simulations, etc. Didn't Pixar use them for those early computer animations?
But the relentless drive of Moore's law seems to have crushed their edge into dust. That's why I asked "what is their purpose." Last I heard, they were trying to be the source of all things Java, but I don't have the impression that Java has turned into the giant killer it was touted to be.
Would it be fair to cast Sun as another DEC, with Scott McNealy as Ken Olsen?
(steely)
I just performed a repair on one (bad disk drive) - it has last been booted 5+ years ago. 5+ years. try that with anything else.
Well, I didn't, so I did. ;)
Amen. I shudder to think about how many Sparc 2 stations might actually be running out there. It's funny that you could configure one of their workstations to carry a server workload that a windoze box would collapse under.
I did love the Enterprise servers (besides the power consumption). I've had one that lasted over 700 days with 0 down time, until we had to move her. They shut her down about a month ago, 4 years after I left the company.
/johnny
/johnny
What you say is correct.
However, my department bought a Sun server about 8 years ago for 20k. It was as reliable as you say. Still, we had to replace it. We did so with a Dell LINUX server that cost about 2k and had much more space for the users, etc.
Sun made great stuff, but they still thought that they lived in the pre-bubble/LINUX world where they could get people to buy things at such premium prices.
SUNW is up in after-hours trading, so despite the awful
results, the market evidently takes this departure as a
a positive move.
yes, I understand. your application isn't mission critical. and in much of the non-critical segment, people buy based solely on price - and Sun was hurt there. but there is a smaller market for the kinds of hardware and software environment they make.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that computers are going to continue getting cheaper, faster, and more powerful. You can't live off your reputation forever.
I have done that with an Indigo...
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