No clowns left in the McNealy Circus

Scott McNealy was a visionary and a disaster.  First instead of using Java as an insurance against future loss, he literally gave away the java compiler . Almost everyone ate Sun's lunch and pissed on it in gratitude. IBM, BEA . HP, Oracle, etc. etc. etc.

Next he takes OpenOffice and attempts to bring down MS Office. That move might succeed at some point. But its of no benefit at all to Sun. Now the entire world eats Sun's lunch and pisses on it once again in gratitude.

Excuse me?. This was supposed to drive the sales of Sun hardware. There is no evidence of this at all.

Next this clown sells 1 million seats per year desktop machines to China. And sheepishly admits he wont make any profit out of it. The entire 1 billlion population of China pisses on Sun in gratutude.

Now, the last act before bowing out seems to be the Java Desktop machines retailing at Walmart. Another crazy move is to open source Solaris. This is not to mention equally crazy initiatives like the Looking Glass.

And now archrival Microsoft has offered to give some money to Sun to buy soap and clean up.  But the piss seems to have penetrated the skin far too deeply to have any effect.

Soaked in piss, Sun is destined to ride of into the sunset on a motorbike.

They lighted up the world we lived. We will all miss Sun. Its now a matter of time.

K
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Almost good angle but presented as a nice juicy troll...

Li-fan Chen
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Yeah, K, sort of...

We tried to license the Sparc core for embedded products, back in '93-'94.  They were clueless: huge up front bureacracy and fees (even by semi company standards).  We went with the ARM.  Today PPC, ARM, MIPS are the most common embedded CPUs.  Sparc never got used by anyone.

We recently (2 years ago) tried to license the J2ME VM from Sun.  Again, huge up front fees.  We went with a non-certified VM vendor.  The non-cert vendor is extremely helpful and being non-certified they have no problem adding extensions where they make sense (like native memory mapping and hooks not provided by J2ME).

Sun pisses people off.  So now they ride off pissed.

One more thought:  The days of monolithic, unilateral, winner take all, conquer the world are over.  Sun had its brief days of glory.  But, IMO, it believed in the monolith scenario - a Microsoft wannabe.  I shed only a few tears for what might have been, but shed no tears for McNeally and what was.

hoser
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Too much piss from a non-PC company.

Moo moo
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Does anybody find it weird that these CEOs are just a little bit wacky?

McNealy.. Ellison.. these guys are or were in charge of billions of dollars and frankly I think they're a couple of nut jobs. Ross Perot too, although I don't think EDS counts as a high tech company.

Jorel on Software
Monday, May 3, 2004

Does Gates or Ballmer sound normal to you?

Ellison built the company up almost from scratch. He's the archtypal salesman and that was the role he played in building up Oracle; the developers regularly used to phone up Ellison to ask him what he had promised the customers so they might know what to start coding. You start off selling vaporware and then make a huge success of it, you're not going to be normal..

Equally, when you get to holding a certain degree of power you find yourself surrounded by sycophants, and it becomes increasingly hard to keep a grasp on reality. The same applies to newspaper proprietors and politicians.

Stephen Jones
Monday, May 3, 2004

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