Scott McNealy has a big mouth
COMMENTARY
For a guy who surely qualifies as one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs of our time, Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy has an odd propensity to act like a real jerk.
OK, he was a sheltered rich kid who began life with a silver spoon in his mouth. Big deal. So was Bill Gates and nobody drags that point up when they assess his career.
McNealy, a savvy business exec, proved his mettle by outthinking and outmaneuvering bigger rivals such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard every step of the way. After building Sun into a multibillion dollar enterprise, his resume got even better. Apologies to Kim Polese and Time Magazine (which wrongly turned Marimba's chief executive into the Internet's poster child), but McNealy's the one who deserves the lion's share of the credit for turning Java into the force it's become.
These are impressive credentials, to be sure. And every time I hear some supposedly learned observer of the current U.S. scene bemoan our future, I dismiss their warnings as wasted hand-wringing - and precisely because of super talents like McNealy.
But as much as I try to admire this guy, McNealy's a hard one to actually like -- and for a very simple reason: He can't resist opening his yap to say something obnoxious whenever the subject is Microsoft or Bill Gates. We're not talking shock-jock Howard Stern big mouth here. We're talking about the computer industry's incarnation of Don Rickles -- bitingly funny and full of shtick.
You can always count on McNealy to say something outrageous, deprecatory or otherwise insulting about the Redmondians and their billionaire boss. Not that Microsoft isn't frequently deserving of a public tongue-lashing, but let's lose the pretense: They're hardly the embodiment of ultimate evil.
Yet for as long as I can remember, McNealy has led a crusade to rouse the public to the danger lurking in Redmond, Wash. All in a high-minded spirit.
Of course.
And all in the interests of making this a safer planet for personal computing.
Of course.
But there's an obvious piece of info that he leaves out of his routine: All through the years, McNealy's prescriptions for computing have been designed to thwart the Wintel duopoly, which poses a deadly threat to Sun's server business.
If Java becomes a pervasive computing platform managing applications across entire corporate sites, Microsoft would feel the impact. Oh, by the way, that would help fuel sales of servers, which, by the way, just happens to be Sun's mainstay product.
Now Sun has upped the ante and taken Microsoft to court. But as reported on ZDNN, if Microsoft prevails in court, Sun could wind up actually losing control of Java
Should that day ever come to pass, the wise-cracking McNealy might find himself at the sharp end of one of his own one-liners.