Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Who is Sun's new CEO?

April 25, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Who is Sun's new CEO?

TAGS: Platforms

During an analysts' conference call on April 24, Scott McNealy announced that Jonathon Schwartz would succeed him as CEO. McNealy labored to set aside speculation that his departure was not his choice, or that he might have mixed feelings about getting busted to President. "I'm thrilled to death. I think it's wonderful. I couldn't be more excited. The timing fit me to a T."

If it helps you pay attention to the meat of this analysis, which centers on Sun's future and its relevance to IT, we'll speculate that McNealy and Sun's board were forced into a showdown by Schwartz’s prospective departure. It's remarkable that Schwartz stayed with Sun as long as he has. He's the definition of a walking, talking wasted asset, and it speaks well of Sun that the board, or McNealy, or whomever finally figured out what to do with him.

Schwartz's ascent to CEO had the intended immediate effect of boosting Sun's share price going into a slow quarter. With Sun, a jump in stock price usually means analysts expect a chop in head count. Analysts might not have been listening when Schwartz practically took a bite out of a journalist who asked if staff cutbacks were part of Schwartz's plan to conduct a company-wide "comprehensive review" of everything from products and projects to real estate. Said Schwartz, "This is a comprehensive review of growth opportunities, not shrink opportunities!"

The McNealy administration was so obsessed with inventing new growth opportunities that it neglected the opportunities closest at hand. Sun was off screwing around with diskless desktop PCs, Sun-branded Java distributions and commodity 1U rack boxes when it should have been working on intelligent sensors (of which RFID is just one type), making Java the center of the embedded and mobile universe, and establishing itself as the leader in low-power, high-availability server computing. Sun had an early grip on all of these, but it let one opportunity after another fly past only to be caught by a competitor or fade from sight.

In contrast, Schwartz is a strategic genius who, whenever a little power was meted out to him, made unconventional and astonishingly good decisions, many of which have involved opening proprietary technologies that would otherwise rust away, and calling truces on old and costly feuds. For example, Solaris 10 is an exceptional OS that's the system software backbone of Sun's major enterprise installations, but the cost of distributing and supporting onesie-twosie Solaris shrink-wrap box sales wouldn't justify the revenues. So Schwartz opened Solaris to turn it into a highly-visible training ground for developers and a beehive for a word of mouth community. This will go a long way toward defusing large customers' disdain toward proprietary operating systems. And those prospects who whine about Red Hat's advantageously fat library of compatible applications will find a "yes, but..." in Solaris' ability to run Red Hat in an isolated container within Solaris.

Schwartz first came to InfoWorld's attention when he scored a strategic win by calling off unwinnable battles with Apache and JBoss over Java validation, and he's working to bury the hatchet with Microsoft. Most recently, Sun opened up the source code for its Niagara multi-core/multi-thread SPARC CPU.

The method to Schwartz's apparent madness is consistency and focus of mission. Schwartz favors slimming Sun's objectives down to one presentation slide's worth of bullet points. That requires setting aside the distractions of nurturing the ideas that should have been composted and of settling the battles that became matters of principle rather than business.

Sun can't sustain by selling and supporting individual products, Dell-style, to individuals and small businesses. Schwartz pointed to a return to Sun's original market targets, the "money's no object" major accounts in the world's corporate, institutional, government and defense markets. Trying to be all to all, to be the General Electric of computing that Scott McNealy seemed to want Sun to be, is too expensive and scatters resources too wide. Look for Sun to be getting out of the lightbulb business soon.

Does that mean Schwartz will be off on a staff-cutting spree? That decision would have to be forced on him by the board. To date, when Schwartz has judged projects unworthy of the effort to productize and distribute them, he didn't pull the plugs and send developers packing. Instead, he recycled, building the skills of Sun's developers and building community rapport worth more than the lackluster products those projects would have become (or already were). He also took to heart the open source message that one can openly share intellectual property while still owning and protecting it.

Schwartz's plan is working, but until now, his reach has been limited to software. Now he'll reach out to systems and services. Sun will change, and we think it'll be for the better.

Posted by Tom Yager on April 25, 2006 11:35 AM

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