When will Scott McNealy realize that he’s no longer relevant? One of my favorite quotes from his interview with the New York Times:
“If you want to do a little experiment, go to Google and type “Scott McNealy software is going to free.” You just Google on that – you will go back and see that I was predicting five years ago that software was going to go to a zero-right-to-use model”
Linux is eating your lunch so you have little choice but to give away Solaris. Sadly you didn’t predict you’re stock would be in the toilet. Scott, you’re not nearly as entertaining when you’ve been marginalized. Gates stopped losing sleep over Sun a long time ago. Your public put downs of Bill are now seen as pathletic rather than witty although they have diminished to a trickle since you cashed the $1.2 billion settlement check. Hopefully that money will save a few jobs for the time being.
Scott goes on to dodge questions about whether or not he’s happy with Sun shares at around the cost of a Happy Meal and when Sun will return to profitability. Scott followed the Steve Jobs rule of dealing with Microsoft. To quote Steve Miller: “Go on, take the money and run…”
Nordquist Blog 
You are quick to criticize, but you offer no solutions to problems you think we have — yet you don’t really state them. Are you sure Linux is eating our lunch? Do we get any credit at all for JDS/Linux? Or for selling Linux systems? Or for OpenOffice, which helps Linux? Or our contribuions to GNOME, which also helps Linux? Have you ever met Scott? What would you do if you were in his position? Ever run a $12 billion company with 32,000 employees? (Maybe you have, I don’t know.) Why do you say we are giving Solaris away? What do you know about Solaris, anyway? Anything? (Maybe you do, I dont know … I can’t tell from your post … if you do I apologize). We are open sourcing the system and building a community based on the Solaris market, not giving it away. Big difference. And, our customers are actually excited about it. I talk to them every day to bring them into the OpenSolaris Pilot Program.
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Come on Brett… your just blathering here. Scott was right, he’s been looking at a day where the software would be an integrated part of the hardware solution rolled into a single package which has been looked at from both the “software will be free” (free as in beer) and the “hardware will be free” perspectives. Solaris has been $0 RTU for quite some time now; support is a diffrent matter. Obviously making something like a directory server $0 RTU isn’t as easy as an operating system. Scott’s been saying the same things over and over and over for years and does anyone really get what he’s been driving at? No! Maybe his causual approach catches people off guard but Zander never had effect either.
As for Sun’s stock. If you look at it, it really was a rather graceful (if you can have such a thing) fall from grace by putting in a well placed split in 2001. But, since you obviously know so little about Sun stock, education yourself: go over to NASDAQ.com and pull up the chart for SUNW. Then compare that chart with the NASDAQ Composite, S&P500, AAPL, IBM, and HP… guess what, SUNW hasn’t done so bad has it. In fact, the only “mistake” Sun’s had is that it’s performance was so blisteringly steller for awhile that it really looks bad today. Sure, most people want to remember the old $100+ days, but tell that to Larry over at VA Linux. Sun investors stick in it for the long haul because Sun provides a seriously invoative and powerful value proposition. Don’t blame Sun for the fact that they were over-valued in the markets for awhile; thats not a bad thing at all. With Sun stock cheap, I’m buying it up where I can… laugh if you like.
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Jim, don’t forget mozilla, grid engine, etc. http://www.sunsource.net.
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I don’t doubt that Sun as a company is doing great things. My point was and still is that in the past McNeely was able to garner press by making disparaging remarks about Gates and Microsoft. But that ploy has lost its usefulness, and nobody is paying attention to him any longer. Interesting how he made most of those comments while Sun was flying high but has shut his trap while Sun sliced jobs and continues to bleed.
Benr: you tell me to learn more about the stock. Well I did and Sun looks worse than ever. Going back 5 years:
MSFT is down 45%
IBM is down 15%
AAPL is up 35%
HPQ is down 60%
SUNW is down a whopping 90% (“rather graceful drop”) nice spin!
I hope Sun pulls it together and I recognize their contributions to the Open source community. Maybe McNeely is the guy to pull them out of this slump, but I’d suggest he spend all his time running Sun instead of making pithy comments about Gates to anyone who will listen.
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