Sun goes on the software offensive
Published: 18 Sep 2003 16:50 BST
The best form of defence, allegedly, is attack. Never one to do things by halves, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy has taken this strategem on board -- and then some.
Confronted with a stalling stock price -- caused to some extent by the company's potential customers opting for the cheaper combination of Linux or Windows on Intel rather than Sun's Solaris operating system on its expensive but robust servers -- McNealy has decided to not only hit back but slip a pound of lead into his boxing gloves.
Sun lost around $2.38bn in the last financial year along with then president and former COO Ed Zander. Adding insult to injury, the company's image as a technology innovator took a blow last week when the company's chief scientist and uber-geek Bill Joy announced he was leaving the company possibly to start his own firm.
But rather than trying to simply roll over, go with the flow and rely on continuing areas of strength in high-end supercomputing and Java-based Web services, Sun has apparently decided that rather than carving a niche for itself in the current computing landscape, it's going to bulldoze a quarry.
Speaking at this week's SunNetwork 03 conference in San Francisco, in typical bullish mood, trademark white teeth on display to the home crowd of Sun groupies, McNealy kicked off the three-day event by aping the controversial campaign to recall the current governor of California, Gray Davies, by promising to "recall cost and complexity" in the IT industry.
McNealy then went on to imitate US late-night talk show host David Letterman's trademark 'top ten' shtick with a supposedly comedic list of reasons IT is too costly and complex. "Number Eight: Of the $87bn slated to rebuild Iraq -- $80bn is slated for IBM Global Services," he quipped.
The Sun chief -- who named his children Maverick, Dakota, Colt and Scout after US cars -- also continued an analogy he has been pushing for the last year or more, that the computing industry should model itself on the motor industry. In this analogy, the industry should focus on the "performance and handling of systems" rather than getting caught up in the nuts and bolts of individual components such as operating systems and processors.
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