Scott says...
By Margie Wylie and Jai Singh
Staff Writers, CNET NEWS.COM
Scott McNealy is not a subtle man. The athletic six-foot-something CEO of Sun Microsystems believes in working hard, playing hard, and never pulling a punch.
If you want to understand McNealy, look at the company he's nourished for 13 years. In its early days, the atmosphere at Sun was more like a hyperactive fraternity house than a business. The April Fool's jokes are legendary. One year a Volkswagen Bug was taken apart and reassembled piece by piece in an executive's office. Another year, a Ferrari mysteriously appeared in the duck pond. Today, with over 16,000 employees, the nearly $6 billion company appears a little more staid, but employees at all levels can be heard quoting the jeans-and-T-shirt CEO in the halls of Sun. "Scott says...," the sentence invariably begins.
In the war of words between network computer and personal computer proponents, one might expect McNealy to line up with the PC crowd. After all, Sun's cash cow is a line of desktop computers that are faster, more powerful, and have more features than the average PC. No way. McNealy thinks that Java, a programming language that can run on any kind of computer, will make network computers the wave of the future for both workplaces and individuals. "Maybe this will look like one of the biggest, silliest boondoggles, but Sun is betting all the marbles on network computing," McNealy says.
Sun is one of the companies that, like Oracle, will sell NCs later this year. However, McNealy insists that NCs are only the start. Like Xerox PARC's Mark Weiser, McNealy believes we'll be living in a connected world where set-top boxes, navigational devices, and even phones will work in ways similar to NCs. That means all these devices will need powerful central computers to connect to, something Sun also just happens to sell, McNealy grins.
NEWS.COM caught up with McNealy in his company's Mountain View offices, where he talked about the uselessness of the modern PC, the future prospects of the NC, the part Java will play in transforming communications, and a unique proposition for fighting teenage drug use.
NEWS.COM: Now you can get a decent PC for under $1,000. In the corporate world, why would the NC appeal since the price point of the PC is coming down?
McNealy: What is the total cost of ownership of the PC? Of course it has service and support...
And software, and upgrades, and security issues, and user administration issues, there's a whole suite of issues around which the least of your worries is the up-front cost of the PC. I think we're trying to solve a different suite of problems.
You can still have your personal desktop. You just don't store files or applications locally. We run that environment here today at Sun: I don't store any files locally on my computer and I store no applications. It's wonderful! I wouldn't know how to back up a file; I wouldn't know how to load a software application. I don't even know how to load a CD into a computer. You know what? I don't need to. I have access to 350 applications on my desktop a mouse click away is all it is.
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