McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun (2010) | Hacker News Reader

McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun (2010)

cnet.com

50 pointsecliptik37 comments

"Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally."

Not many tech CEOs can say that.

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).

It's his memo.

My epitaph will also say what a wonderful person I was.

You are free to show that the statement was wrong.

Lest we forget, "You have zero privacy. Get over it." came from him (https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/)

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.)

You omitted "anyway" and that does change the tone.

McNealy was also a member of the 1776 Commission, and held a fundraiser for Trump at his mansion.

Even Ed McCracken could write something like that about himself.

He'd use crayons or something to do it, but still.

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.

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:

https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...

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.

""" Saw McNealy on his throne

All alone and only bones """

I will forever associate his name with this song: https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#33

Probably worth to add the context as well:

"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."

Additionally OpenBSD 3.3 was released in 2003. In 2005 SUN started with opensourcing large parts of the SPARC processor design. You can find some of it here: https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc.html

Knowing what we know now, could Sun have a way to survive/thrive with the competition from x86 and Linux?

> "...But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company," McNealy said in the memo.

Does this help explain the fall of Java? Of Sun?

No.

> Does this help explain the fall of Java?

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.

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.

I'm surprised this is just occuring to me now, but is Java the next COBOL?

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.

So old that by 2010 there were memes about it... IIRC.

When I first saw it, Java was aspiring to be the language of the Web (and set-top boxes).

And it could've been (not the applet plugins that the browser vendors temporarily permitted, but more like HotJava, ubiquitous computing, etc.).

If Java was intended for enterprise (MIS programmers), they wouldn't have made it look like C.

And despite Java's pivot to enterprise, Microsoft was still able to get people to re-up for their over-the-barrel backstabbings, to adopt .NET.

I know Java is big in enterprise, but IMHO it's a fall from what it could've been.

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.

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.

@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.

We have enough tools at our disposal, it will sort itself out.

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