Sun and sundries
Scott McNealy stepped down as CEO of Sun Microsystems this week after 22 years in that position. He will be replaced by Jonathon Schwartz, McNealy's protege, often described in the press using the adjective "pony-tailed."
Sun loses money. $217 million last quarter, as a matter of fact. Their revenue is generally okay, but their profitability has been sliding.
They're inconsequential.
That's the worst thing that can happen to a Silicon Valley exec--to be ignored. Sun was the "It" company in the Valley for many, many years. Some of the best tech people in the business cut their teeth at Sun. Sun's championship of things like UNIX-based windowing systems, NFS and BSD in general, provided a platform that serious developers used as their first choice for serious development.
I went to IBM in 1994 into the fledgling Internet division and given the time constraints of projected development, I insisted that we build the initial system on Sun boxes instead of IBM ones. After a lot of grief, I was allowed to do so (although quietly). Every UNIX geek that I knew used BSD, SunOS and eventually Solaris and could handle a Sparc station in their sleep.
Now, they sell big servers to the government and large companies, but they're not the development platform of choice for hot developers anymore; now it's Linux and in a pinch, Windows.
Sun's business moves don't shake the industry. I had to hunt for the announcement of the CEO change on the Washington Post website, because it quickly disappeared off the front page into the back of the business section. Ten years ago, it would have been all over the paper, because it would have been significant to an industry, not just a company.
Today they're inconsequential.
I have no solution, but some suggestions. Sun's success was lockstepped to that of the Valley and its geeky denizens. Sun prospered because they'd tied themselves to an industry.
They should reinvent themselves by owning new areas of expertise that they could excel at. Grid computing would be a good example of something that they do well.
They need a new image and a plan, not for this year or next, but ten years out...what do they sell? Big servers, cheap workstations, integrated hardware/software vertical solutions or maybe web services?
It may turn out that they were tied to an earlier era that doesn't exist anymore--that they were the general store servicing the cowboy geeks of the wild, wild Internet. Their time may have passed, but hey, that's what billion dollar mergers and acquisitions are all about. Changing the business usually means more than just changing the CEO, often it takes something a little more drastic, some kind of corporate electroshock.
I remember Jonathon from Lighthouse. He struck me as energetic and creative, two qualities that he'll need in this position.
I have fond memories of Sun and so do many others. I wish them well.
Posted on April 26, 2006
