Friday, April 28, 2006

Bye Scott

This has nothing to do with Bangladesh but since I worked at Sun for 15 years, I have some opinions about Scott McNealy who just gave up the CEO position.

My favorite quote from Scott was simply: "Character matters". He is extremely strong on personal integrity. I think this was the main reason why he hates Microsoft. He saw them as breaking the law (which was the verdict of the Federal anti-trust case against Microsoft.)

I know some personal details of Scott's life that I don't want to go into (my kids went to the same school as his) - except to say that in these details emerged glimpses of a life lived as if character mattered.

Scott made Sun from zero into a 20 Billion dollar company. It is extremely unlikely that without Java and other Sun innovations, the Internet would be what it is today.

His weakness was refusing to do large layoffs when the bubble burst. His mistake was holding on to people who were less than competent for their job levels (and some of them are still at Sun unfortunately.)

But boy does he have vision! Scott sees the (tech) future more clearly than any other tech luminary I have seen or known.

No comments: