6 ms·
McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun (2010)
- Animats 3y ago"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.
- jsiepkes 3y agoGates 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 https://youtu.be/IY2j_GPIqRA?t=14 (audio warning).
- oblio 3y agoIt's his memo. My epitaph will also say what a wonderful person I was.
- sgift 3y agoYou are free to show that the statement was wrong.
- sillywalk 3y agoMcNealy was also a member of the 1776 Commission, and held a fundraiser for Trump at his mansion.
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- sgift 3y agoI have seen your posts and that you don't like the man. I don't like supporting Trump either. But that has nothing to do with the statement above. edit: Since you edited your post since I've answered: I also disagree with his opinions on Corona. Still has nothing to do with the statement above. edit2: I'm tired of you stealth editing your post every other minute and your accusations. Find someone else to play.
- saiya-jin 3y agoyou can counter this easily by quoting him fully in your post... if you actually care about such a discussion
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Etheryte 3y ago> You said "You are free to show that the statement was wrong." And I did. Now suddenly you don't want to play the game you asked for [...] This is both childish and absurd, surely you can try and make your point in a way that doesn't make a complete fool of yourself.
- Pixie_Dust 3y ago@DonHopkinsSee: "See my other posts about McNealy wanting to be as Evil as Bill Gates and Microsoft" Do please enlighten us out of your own extensive experience.
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoLest we forget, "You have zero privacy. Get over it." came from him (https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ 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.)
- omnibrain 3y agoYou omitted "anyway" and that does change the tone.
- justin66 3y agoEven Ed McCracken could write something like that about himself. He'd use crayons or something to do it, but still.
- HillRat 3y agoAnd 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.
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- sokoloff 3y ago> 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.
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- user_named 3y agoYOU seem crazy.
- tyingq 3y agoIt'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.
- DonHopkins 3y ago[flagged]
- bloopernova 3y ago@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.
- the-dude 3y agoWe have enough tools at our disposal, it will sort itself out.
- veave 3y ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 3y agoAnd you regularly make racist and sexist and transphobic comments on Hacker News (presumably including many more on your old banned account): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131503f https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131503f https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36877613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36877613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36874766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36874766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36777515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36777515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36381988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36381988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36348977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36324106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36324106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36307951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36272568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36184093 And then you complain about being downvoted and flagged for being racist and sexist and transphobic, then attack the moderator: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131564 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?
- kriro 3y ago""" 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 https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#33
- ninjin 3y agoProbably 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."
- jsiepkes 3y agoAdditionally 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 https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc.html
- jensgk 3y ago@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.
- neilv 3y ago> "...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?
- nl 3y agoNo.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> 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.
- adventured 3y agoThe 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.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoI'm surprised this is just occuring to me now, but is Java the next COBOL?
- adamc 3y agoSo old that by 2010 there were memes about it... IIRC.
- nradov 3y agoIn 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.
- vladak 3y agoI (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/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b2448a 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.
- mgkimsal 3y agoI 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.
- Zelphyr 3y agoI 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.
- pstuart 3y agoKnowing what we know now, could Sun have a way to survive/thrive with the competition from x86 and Linux?