Sun at 25: Where are the founders now?
608994
InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? InfoWorld went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found.
686085
Rolf Disch has harnessed the sun in his city of Freiburg, starting with his own house. It looks like an upside-down Apollo spacecraft and serves as a testing ground for ideas dreamed up by the 63-year-old solar architect. The home slowly turns with the sun to charge a billboard-sized solar panel on the roof, and the waterless toilet emits an occasional malodorous whiff.
740475
Sun Microsystems Inc. has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.
296195
BRIC nation Sun Microsystems is looking to billions of citizens in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), defined by the west as emerging economies, for long-term success.â¦
14587
(InfoWorld) - Andreas, or simply, Andy, Bechtolsheim holds the distinction of having employee badge #1 among the thousands of people who have worked at Sun Microsystems in its 25 years of existence. Perhaps best known as the inventor of the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, he is among the four founders of the company, along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Although he left the company in 1995 to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup, he returned to Sun in 2004 via the company's Kealia acquisition. Bechtolsheim also was a vice president at Cisco Systems while away from Sun. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Bechtolsheim about Sun's past and present situation, with Bechtolsheim chiming in on about topics including open source and the Intel and SPARC chip architectures. [See also a Slideshow: "25 years of Sun" | PDF: "Timeline of Sun's achievements"] InfoWorld: First of all, was Bill Joy actually the fourth employee at Sun? Or wasn't he more like the 15th or 16th employee? Bechtolsheim: I think his official badge number was 6 because there were two people we hired on day one, and he came [onboard approximately] the next week. But he was considered a founder. InfoWorld: And you wore badge number 1, right? Bechtolsheim: Well, that's because I worked on the workstation for three years before the company started, although I think Bill worked on Berkeley Unix longer than that. So maybe he should have been number 1. The way the company started was I had a previous business that was actually licensing the design [of] the Sun workstation to other companies in exchange for royalties. And I had a whole bunch of people set up making these boards. It dazzles me that none of these companies had any clue about the workstation business. They had all the pieces, but they didn't see the market opportunity, and I was kind of getting frustrated because I was really more the engineer, the hardware guy, than the businessman. So Khosla called me saying, "Let's just start a company. This was the obvious solution to the problem of how to bring this product to market. InfoWorld: I know you've left Sun, you've come back, and I think there's been a couple exits and returns.Â  Bechtolsheim: No, no, no, there was just one. I left in 1995 to start a Gigabit Ethernet company called Granite, which Cisco acquired in 1996, and then I spent seven years at Cisco until the end of 2003. And then I left Cisco to start a company, which Sun acquired in 2004. InfoWorld: What are you doing these days? Bechtolsheim: Well, my official title here is chief architect of industry standard [products] and I'm basically responsible for the product definition of our industry-standard architectures [offerings]. InfoWorld: How do you view Sun after 25 years? The company has had its ups and downs, mostly ups except for the last few years. How do you view the company at this point and where do you think it's headed? Bechtolsheim: One reason I left in 1995 is that one of my concerns at the time was that we should be really building an x86-based server, and I was getting worried that the cost performance of those systems was edging up with the SPARC architecture. Here I am 10 years later or 12 years later actually doing what I suggested the company should be doing earlier.... People keep asking was this like a prearranged marriage? But the honest truth was I had no idea I would be coming back to Sun. I was actually happy building this [sort of] little business, but when Sun decided to enter the industry-standard market, it became an opportunity to build a much more significant business here. So that's why I'm back here. InfoWorld: Were you the founder of the SPARC architecture? Bechtolsheim: What happened is Bill, even though he was really the software guy, became convinced in, I think it was 1984, that Motorola and the whole microprocessor architecture they were using, which was the 68000, was just not keeping up, or not taking advantage of what the technology could do. And after some interesting investigations, we concluded that we might as well design our own architecture, which was, for a small startup company, quite the bold thing to do. What was correct about this was it gave us a performance lead for many, many years, and then [we grew] the company to many, many billion dollars. So it was actually a very successful decision. Now, I was not involved in the original SPARC chip design. However, I was involved in the design of SPARCstation 1, which was really the first high-volume product around SPARC, which was a pizza-box workstation that was launched in 1989. And that was actually Sun's best-selling product for a while, and that was followed by the SPARCstation 2 and 10 and 20. And then I guess I got a little tired of doing all these workstations, so I decided there was a new opportunity in gigabit networking. But now I do see an opportunity back in the server space, and that's why I'm back here. InfoWorld: Do you think SPARC has much of a future at this point? Bechtolsheim: Well, it's the mainstream of the company. In fact, it's growing again. And the price performance and power efficiency of these multithreaded architectures is quite compelling. Now, having said that, it is Solaris-only, so it defines the Solaris market, whereas the industry-standard architecture of course runs Linux as well as Windows. From a volume perspective, the industry's architecture is way ahead. But we have a number of very loyal SPARC customers, and we don't see a reason to switch anytime soon, so we will keep investing in SPARC as long as that makes sense. InfoWorld: Would you say that Sun has righted the ship? I remember quarter after quarter after quarter where Sun was just getting bigger and bigger. And then during dot.com bust, Sun, like everybody else, slipped. Would you say that you righted the ship with the open-sourcing of Solaris and Java and that sort of thing? And also, what is your take on the open-sourcing of Java? I don't know if you ever actually publicly stated it. Bechtolsheim: I wasn't at Sun when the crash happened. From the outsider's view, Sun probably reacted a little too slowly to the change in business fundamentally. So the company would have been better off at the time to downsize more quickly. But that was six years ago, so that's neither here nor there. The open-sourcing of Solaris is actually going very well. There have been over 5 million downloads to date. We don't actually know what people are doing with all these downloads. It's kind of fascinating to see people in Pakistan and India and China and all over the world downloading this code, and something interesting is about to happen here, I would think, and the same about Java of course. So perhaps the company should have opened up these systems sooner, but nobody's complaining about the fact that it's open now. And it certainly has received very positive feedback from developers and other people who want to make either extensions or just understand how this stuff is working. InfoWorld: When you say positive feedback from developers, you're talking about Solaris and Java, or just Solaris? Bechtolsheim: Well, I want to touch on the Solaris side. Java, of course, runs on all kinds of platforms, such as Solaris. But I'm not with the part of the company that's working on all the Java things, so I can't really speak to that.... Open-source software has a compelling advantage because the potential customers know that there's a difference in openness with open software than with any kind of closed software. And more and more governments and companies decide that that's the right thing to do. InfoWorld: So you're in favor of the open-sourcing of Java? Bechtolsheim: That was definitely the right thing to do.... Keep in mind that when Sun started, Berkeley Unix was essentially the first open-source operating system because you would get a copy of the source code just by sending a $100 check to Berkeley, which covered the cost of making a tape and sending it to you, right? In some sense, we should have kept that tradition all along, so the fact that Solaris was not always as open as it is today was basically a sort of mistake.Â  InfoWorld: So can Sun still make money selling hardware and services even though the software is now basically free in many instances? Bechtolsheim: It's no different than Linux, right? Even though Linux itself is free, there's a cost for support and so on, and Solaris support actually, as far as that, is less expensive than a Red Hat subscription. So we are in fact competing with the Linux model. InfoWorld: What are you most proud of in the 25 years of Sun, and what is your biggest disappointment? Bechtolsheim: [There are] all the good memories certainly [of] the early days with the first Sun workstation, the first SPARCstation, UltraSPARC, and so on. All of these were major milestones that really propelled the company forward. And my personal involvement was by far the greatest with the SPARCstation series of products. Actually, really all the workstation products, but the SPARCstation really broke new grounds for the company in terms of just being a high-volume platform. One of the disappointments was that we didn't take advantage of the x86 architecture earlier. We should have done that in the 1990s certainly, not just a few years ago. But by the same token, there's ongoing innovation here, and it's not too late to re-enter that market. InfoWorld: I keep thinking back to something like Open Look versus Motif. Do you think Sun has been a rebel sort of company?Â  Bechtolsheim: No, I think that's the wrong way to look at it. If you want to innovate, you sometimes have to throw things out and see whether you can make them successful. Because there's no easy way in advance to predict how exactly it will play out. Open Look is an example where something was not successful, even though we tried, we tried to give it away to the industry, but at the time, there was this counterforce called the Open Software Foundation, which was really the IBM, HP, DEC club to prevent Sun from growing, and whatever [we] were doing, they would oppose and do it differently. Now the Open Software Foundation, of course, wasn't successful either. There's nothing that remains from that. But the unfortunate thing is that what we were telling these other companies at the time was that the problem was Microsoft, not Sun, and they just didn't believe it. And a few years later that was more evident, but a lot of energy was wasted during that period of Unix companies trying to slow each other down, which really wasn't beneficial to anyone. But again, this was an industry matter of fact that we could just observe that not everybody understood open systems at the time, but I think it's clear now.
605084
Roy Ganor, a committer on the Eclipse PDT project has written up a post from an insider's perspective on the whole thing and the path that led them to a stable 1.0 release.   Today the PDT project community consists of about 30 users that are daily involved, and about 300 users that are weekly involved, and about 13,000 users that are monthly involved in the project . Remarkable! by any mean of open-source project.   He talks about initial feelings about the move towards PHP, how the community grew surrounding the project and the level of integration that the project has with both the Eclipse software and with the Eclipse community.
263483
(InfoWorld) - Oct. 18, 2000, might go unnoticed in the long history of Sun Microsystems, but it marked a critical moment in the history of a company that celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. On that day, an upbeat Scott McNealy spoke with analysts and unveiled his company's eye-popping first quarter earnings ($510 million on revenue of $5 billion -- an 88 percent increase over the same quarter in 1999). Looking forward, McNealy saw nothing but roses in Sun's future. Systems using the company's new UltraSPARC III processor had gone on sale in the preceding quarter, and McNealy predicted they'd be big hits in Sun's enterprise customer base, "offering unprecedented levels of uptime, reliability and quality."Â  It wasn't to be. Even as he talked up Sun's future that day, the company he helped found 18 years earlier was slipping, unnoticed, into a challenging new era that would shake it to its core, shake him from his perch as CEO, and challenge the very assumptions and strategies that had turned Sun into a Silicon Valley legend and Wall Street darling. [See also a Slideshow: "25 years of Sun" | PDF: "Timeline of Sun's achievements"] Over the next 12 months, as the air spilled out of a dotcom bubble that had fueled so much of Sun's growth, the company's stock would lose 80 percent of its value. Exactly one year later, McNealy would face the same analysts to announce first quarter revenues that were 43 percent lower than in 2000 and a net loss of $158 million.Â  And the news from Sun wouldn't improve for a long, long time as the company struggled in the years that followed to find a recipe for success while sticking doggedly to homegrown technologies like SPARC and its Solaris operating system. During one dark stretch, the company recorded 10 consecutive quarterly losses -- a blow that would fell many, lesser firms. Instead, Sun said last week that it is on track for a second consecutive profitable quarter after the company posted net income of $126 million on revenues of $3.566 billion for the quarter ending Dec. 31, 2006, ending a streak of five consecutive money-losing quarters. "They're in better shape recently than they were for much of last year," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. The company had been on a slow spiral downward for about five years but has begun to right the ship by focusing on its hardware line, open-sourcing Java and Solaris, and regaining ground in the all-important server market that it had lost to Dell, IBM, and HP more than five years ago, Enderle said. The return to profitability is sweet victory for a company that began as a brash competitor in the technical workstation space, survived the crucible of the dotcom collapse, and now is poised to regain its status as an innovative technology giant just as it celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Founded in late-February 1982 by hardware designer Andreas Bechtolsheim along with entrepreneurs Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla and software guru Bill Joy, Sun sharpened its teeth in the early days by besting bigger, more established firms like Apollo Computer (later part of HP) in the lucrative market for enterprise workstations. An engineer's engineering company to the core, Sun was an early backer of innovative technologies like NFS (Network File System), Java, which started as an internal project by early Sun employee James Gosling in 1991, and open source. That openness to new technologies, coupled with a scrappy corporate culture under hockey enthusiast CEO McNealy, helped Sun thrive throughout the 1990s as a foe of companies like IBM, Microsoft, and HP, even as the advent of personal computers running Intel processors and Microsoft's Windows operating system ate into the enterprise workstation market. The rise of Windows on Intel systems, or "Wintel," was a one-two punch for Sun in the enterprise. At marquee customers like GM, which has been using Sun systems for about 10 to 15 years, Sun workstations long ago gave way to Wintel PCs, said CTO Fred Killeen. "Historically, we would use Sun workstations, less now. The big part of [the switch to Wintel] is the end users now have a common platform that supports all their desktop applications as well as the CAD and CAE applications," Killeen said. Sun responded to the threat with characteristic pluck: disparaging Microsoft and looking to counter it with technologies like Java and OpenOffice. While those efforts did succeed in taking Microsoft down a notch, they did not do much for Sun, Enderle said. But as the 1990s boom revved up to a spectacular collapse at the turn of the millennium, the combative attitude that helped Sun face down bigger rivals blinded it to a changing business environment, allowing competitors to build leads in such areas as Web services standardization and push non-Sun technologies like Intel chips and the Windows OS.Â  Ironically, Sun's previous flag-waving for Solaris and SPARC while momentum mounted for Intel and Linux may have blinded Sun to the need for reform within its own product line and placed the company in the position of appearing as a proprietary systems vendor -- a cruel fate for a company that had always prided itself on being open and based on industry standards. Co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim said that the rise of Intel and Sun's not having an x86 system contributed to his decision to leave the company in 1995. "I was getting worried that the cost performance of those systems was catching up with the SPARC architecture," said Bechtolsheim, who has since returned to Sun as chief architect of industry standard products. But, historically, Sun has always shown a willingness to bend to industry whims, even if it means somebody else's work shares -- or takes -- the spotlight from Sun's own prized technologies. And that willingness to embrace change, backed by new CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who took over from McNealy in April 2006, has enabled Sun to pull up and out of its extended nosedive. These days, Sun is offering Intel systems, just like Bechtolsheim suggested in the 1990s, while it continues to back SPARC. "It's the mainstream of the company. In fact, it's growing again," he said. Sun is repositioning itself strategically as well. Under Schwartz's leadership, the company's focus has shifted from Sun's own proprietary Solaris Unix OS and SPARC RISC hardware to an open-source Solaris and the inclusion of Intel-powered computers on the Sun price list. Sun also offers systems powered by Intel-compatible AMD chips; Sun previously had sold some Intel systems prior to its agreement with AMD in 2003. Taken together with Sun's decision to open-source Java in November 2006 and the agreement, last month, to offer Intel systems, Sun is demonstrating a resolve and then resignation that have allowed the company to survive other existential challenges, such as the 1993 decision to accommodate the Motif user interface after remaining steadfast in support of its own Open Look graphical interface. "Open-source software has a compelling advantage because the potential customers know there's a difference in openness with open software [as opposed to] any kind of closed software," Bechtolsheim said. Berkeley Unix, used in the original Sun workstations, was essentially the industry's first open-source OS, he said. Besides, Bechtolsheim says, there is money to be made in open source through selling support and through sales of the company's hardware. Â At GM, Sun may not be a presence on the desktop, but it's still a significant presence in the data center, where Sun servers run back-end applications," said Killeen. Â Sun software ranging from Solaris to the Sun Java Enterprise System also populates GM. Sun, Killeen said, noting that Sun has been a very good partner for a long time. As Sun moves forward, it continues to face obstacles. Java, once revolutionary, now competes with a multitude of scripting languages that are considered the easier choice for Web application development. These include, ironically, the similarly named JavaScript language and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). And Sun is maintaining an independent streak as one of the few large vendors not participating in the Eclipse Foundation for open-source tooling and instead promotes its own rival NetBeans initiative.Â  While smaller than IBM and less influential than Microsoft, Sun, with its talented arsenal of technologists like Java founder James Gosling, remains a potent force. Just as the company once battled Apollo, Sun can be counted on as a prominent counterpoint to what its rivals are doing, even while Sun cooperates with its opponents when deemed practical.
203592
Red Hat, Dell, IBM and HP get SAMPed Analysis Almost five years ago, Sun's then CEO Scott McNealy told me his company had little intention of entering the great database fray. "You know, we haven't decided that is a war we want to go fight," he said. "Why not let them all beat each others' brains in?".â¦
185390
By Eve Samples, The Palm Beach Post, Fla.  Feb. 19--In 1989, when Clifford Burg retired from the South Florida  home-building empire he and Otto "Buz" DiVosta had founded, he was 47 and  looking to get his hands dirty again.
146347
[Technology India]: London, Oct 31 : Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who have reconstructed the sun&#39;s activity over the last 11 millennia, have forecasted decreased activity within a few decades.
641717
Tonight a new era begins on this broadcast. But not without a word about the era that ended last night, when our friend, mentor and leader signed off after more than two decades on this broadcast.
712651
The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
183504
SunRocket was the brainchild of three telecommunications veterans looking to create an Internet phone service. Exactly three years later, the Vienna start-up is an orphan.
681936
When last interviewed by SYS-CON Radio at LinuxWorld Conference &amp; Expo, Sun&#39;s John Fanelli - senior director of marketing for Sun&#39;s Network Systems Group - was adamant that the sheer number of product offerings Sun has delivered into the Linux community
411714
Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy celebrated his 50th birthday on Nov. 13 -- and two days later his company hit another milestone.
742664
Relatively calm weather was the standard forecast for the  Sun, which is near the end of another 11-year solar  cycle, but raging solar storms just spotted at its south pole now tell a  different story.    Video: Sun Storms
313797
BusinessWeek Online - Tech industry mavens had their doubts about Jonathan I. Schwartz when he was promoted to chief executive of Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW - News) in April, replacing longtime CEO Scott McNealy. There was the ponytail, which helps Schwartz look a lot younger than his 40 years. He also has a brash style that seemed to be out of sync with Sun's grim realities. Did this Web 2.0 CEO have enough gravitas to run a struggling computer company?