In a recent InfoWorld posting, Zack Urlocker interviewed Scott McNealy, though much of the two-part article deals with the role at Sun of Andy Bechtolsheim.

Selling, selling, selling (to paraphrase the real estate industry) is paramount in McNealy's view of every executive's job. "I don’t know anything that you do that doesn’t require selling," he contends. And this extends even to recruiting the best people to your company, he continues.

Selling calls for travel, McNealy added, noting his more than 150,000 airline miles that he logs every year on behalf of Sun.

As to what keeps him involved when he could as easily be out of the golf course, McNealy differed with Urlocker, insisting that he enjoys what he does at Sun far too much to trade his laptop for a golf bag. You might infer that McNealy is passionate about Sun and his place in the company.

Turning to co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, McNealy elevates him to a two-man IT pantheon, along with Steve Jobs. "There are two people in the computer industry that I think are top of the world: Steve Jobs in the consumer space and Andy Bechtolsheim on the industrial side," he says.

"On the industrial side, whether you’re talking about networking, storage or server technology, I don’t think there’s anyone to compare with Andy Bechtolsheim. He’s the most prolific, the most innovative. He’s driven more architectural innovations and computing innovations in hardware infrastructure than anyone. He’s just not as well known." High praise that continues with McNealy's comment, " I think Andy’s probably the most underrated, under-recognized superstar in the history of the computer world."

In Part 2 of the interview, Urlocker and McNealy discuss open source and reflect on his career as head of Sun, after a further instance of appreciation for Bechtolsheim from McNealy: "Andy’s very special. He’s out there seven or eight sigmas beyond the mean in terms of intelligence. He’s way out there to the right. But what he does, he does with humility, with integrity and in a quiet, humble way. It’s pretty spectacular. He’s a rare individual."

Open source is in the very DNA of Sun, McNealy insists, saying, "Sharing has been our corporate strategy since February 24, 1984. ... We think it leverages the world in a nice way. It allows everyone stand on the shoulders of everybody else’s work. It’s very important in enabling technology." McNealy gives much credit to another co-founder, Bill Joy, as the father of the open source strategy.

Explaining his belief in the effectiveness of open source, McNealy says, "...basic economic theory says that if the marginal cost of distribution and manufacturing is zero and the marginal cost of development is near zero as you share development with the rest of the world, then the cost of the product is going to tend towards zero. Rather than fight that wave, we’re going to surf it."

When it comes to ensuring a black-ink bottom line, McNealy says, "We’ll monetize with servers, storage, and subscription services. It creates a whole bunch of opportunities where you can store the software with the data to eliminate format rot. ... You can do the experimentation and implementation without having to get a purchase order. ... We’re getting 70,000 downloads per day on average for MySQL. And we don’t even advertize. It’s just word of mouth."

McNealy's pride in his role at Sun reflects the value of the open source community as well. "There’s a whole community around Sun that is creating a world that is truly networked, safe, secure and leveraged. It’s exciting to be part of the whole web revolution," he says.

If he could do anything over or differently, McNealy picks not moving more quickly into x64 software since, once Sun began to OEM Solaris, Dell, IBM and HP lent their support. He also says the move to open source, which has proved so successful, might have come earlier.

So, McNealy, concludes, don't look for him on the golf course; he'll be on an airplane. [...read more...]

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