And also why selling Sun to Oracle was like selling the rabbit to the wolf. Not sure Oracle can go three minutes without an exec at some level deliberately slamming right through moral and legal guardrails.
Gates and Ballmer even mocked the anti-trust investigation into Microsoft with a clip of the hearing of Scott McNealy in a video: https://youtu.be/IY2j_GPIqRA?t=14 (audio warning).
Sun Microsystems under McNealy were also no friends of Linux or open source. Though less visible than Microsoft, plenty of FUD came from Sun about how Linux would never equal proper operating systems like Solaris. (In a sense, he wasn't wrong; IMO Linux didn't really catch up until Sun Microsystems had effectively died by being sold to Oracle to be gutted.)
I (re)found a small brochure at work that contains the company mission statement with rationale from Scott McNealy. This was long time after Sun was acquired, however I found it interesting enough to retype it:
I've never had the capacity to think deeply about what is within, however I do remember the days around 2007 or so when it seemed to me that there was not a week where some new exciting technology (software or hardware) was not being released. For me as a freshman this was impressive.
I think that's more to do with you being a freshman and being more easily impressed. Others can say the same thing about 1997, or 2017, from a freshman's point of view. Much of the tech stuff released in 2007 was hype, much as it is today, but you don't usually know what's hype vs what is substantive until years year.
@DonHopkins I can see that your comments were flagged and now dead. You should make a blog with your comments and post them here instead. I think they do contain interesting information.
I worked with Scott at a startup he co-founded after Sun. He's a good guy.
I remember him telling me a story about when he first met Tiger Woods. Their wives were college friends so Tiger and his wife visited the McNealy's at their home in the Bay Area.
It was later in the evening, the sun had set (no pun intended), and Scott, being a huge golf fan (his son is a pro golfer now) was picking Tiger's brain. The next thing they knew, they were chucking balls off of Scott's back deck onto the roof of the neighbors house and then running and hiding, giggling like two pre-teen boys making prank calls.
"This song is an allegory of the recent difficulties we went through dealing with Sun, who refused our request for documentation about their UltraSPARC III processors. We want documentation, because these are the fastest processors with a per-page eXecute bit in the MMU, needed to fully support our new W^X security feature. In the meantime, the AMD Hammer has come onto the scene, and this processor supports an eXecute bit in 64-bit mode."
I don't know in which alternative universe Java did fell. Java is huger than huge. It may not be the language of the Web (and this site heavily slants towards people coding in JavaScript) but in the enterprise world Java is really gigantic and won't be sunset before a very long time.
The JVM is an incredible piece of machinery that is not going away either.
FWIW I find it quite funny that many here seems to consider that the JetBrains IDEs are the best IDEs out there... JetBrains is all about the JVM (be it Java or Kotlin). And these aren't going away anytime soon either.
In a sense, yes. That has been a common observation in the industry for years. Java will probably remain the dominant language for business applications for several more decades at least. It probably won't be displaced until the next major disruptive innovation in hardware platforms, to quantum computing or whatever comes next.
The primary thing that happened to Java, is the tech universe got a lot bigger and it didn't retain its former mindshare. That definitely isn't a detraction to Java, it's still a big deal. The same fate - or worse - has happened to all popular languages, without exception.
A Wired article from '03 pretty well sums the reasons for the fall of Sun: https://www.wired.com/2003/07/40mcnealy/ Sun staggered on for a few more years after the situation described there but Niagara (the UltraSPARC T1 and its successors) weren't enough to stave off the Intel juggernaut and the encroachment of Linux and its ecosystem.
I have not investigated this at all, but the way I interpreted this was:
"I love my company. I know it's going to become worse after being acquired by Oracle, but I got a lot of money on the process and I love that more".
So perhaps in an indirect way, it is related. Again, I have not done any research at all, I could be completely mischaracterizing this. He might not have seen a single dime.
@dang I'm honestly not sure what the correct cause of action is when one person is effectively taking over a thread with their comments. They appear to have a deep-seated hatred of Scott McNealy, so perhaps should not be commenting for their own mental and emotional health. But their comments have lots of information that will probably spark a lot of conversation.
My gut feeling is that we shouldn't "encourage" such commentary, but I know many in the HN would disagree with me.
If I or anyone else downvoted, flagged, or insulted your new or banned accounts for saying something racist or sexist or transphobic, then I'm not sorry, because you asked for it and deserved what you got, but the system is working just fine.
Have you considered simply not repeatedly posting racist sexist transphobic bullshit, or just going away after being banned instead of creating a new account, even if you pathetically believe all that bigotry you post?
> leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft".
Calling the software division of Foo company “FooSoft” seems entirely logical to me.
> Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy
When you want to align thousands of employees to the direction you want them to go, identifying and naming a durable enemy and defining your strategy in those terms is an extremely effective strategy communications technique. It’s not the only way, but if you want to beat Microsoft, saying that’s your strategic intent is good.
It's lengthy, but most of the comment is quotes from articles. It's not that odd to me that someone who worked at Sun and saw things first hand might react badly to articles presenting a rose-colored view of McNealy.
Not many tech CEOs can say that.