Industry watch Toolkit

Sun's bright future according to McNealy

Tags:
Sun Microsystems

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 27 Jun 2005 12:05 BST

During the last earnings call, you said you need more revenue growth. What do you do to make that happen?
We have massively focused on customer satisfaction in terms of field satisfaction and hardware reliability. We've never had higher customer satisfaction with respect to how our product works, how it stays up out in the field. That was not true back in the (dot-com) bubble. We were just getting the stuff out the door as fast as we could, and that wasn't a good thing.

Second, three years ago I had a 900MHz UltraSparc III processor that didn't work very reliably. Now we have UltraSparc IV and IV+ coming later this year, UltraSparc IIIi and IIIi+ coming later this year, both of which double the per-socket performance. We've got Opteron dual-core shipping now, and Andy's new machines are due out in the next six months. (Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, chief designer of the company's Opteron servers.) We've got the APL (Advanced Product Line) Sparc mainframe chip jointly developed with Fujitsu coming out early next year. We've got Niagara in early access right now, our 32-thread, eight-core chip multithreading environment. Niagara II will tape out this year, and Rock will tape out next year, which is our high-end machine. So you look just on the microprocessor side, what we've done in the last three years from one 900MHz underpowered product to what we're doing. We're leveraging every single microprocessor out there except two: Itanium -- ha ha -- and Power, which with OpenSolaris out there, we might be able to leverage with a Power port.

What are we doing in the OS world? I think Solaris 10, now open sourced, is the best new product we've introduced in 10 years -- with DTrace, with ZFS, with containers, with trusted Solaris features, with the new, fast IP stack, with the self-healing features, with the coming ability to run Red Hat applications native, and simultaneous support of Intel, AMD and Sparc. Then we open sourced it and priced it for free.

We are now at 2.5bn Java devices on the planet -- (including) 700m cell phones, 700m PCs. We had 17m and 20m downloads in the last couple (of) months of the J2SE environment. That is a stunning number. The new Blu-Ray spec is going to put a Java virtual machine in every new next-generation DVD player, and all your DVDs are going to have Java bytecode on (them) that gets executed.

What else have we fixed? The Java Enterprise System. I think we have a good chance of breaking through a half a million subscribers with our Web services stack at some very unique pricing models. I think we're going to be the player in Web services. People are tired of doing best of breed -- tired of getting their directory server from Novell, their file system from Veritas and their app server from BEA and putting that all together. The Microsoft relationship is a very unique selling proposition.