Re: "McNealy, 64, is a free-market, small-government Republican"
> McNealy didn't react sufficiently to the bubble bursting
No, McNealy didn't wanna hear it that Intel chips had beat SPARC on price/performance. Which is surprising, to say the least, given that he labels himself as a "raging capitalist". The one thing a "raging capitalist" should surely understand is the competition. Or that your own product is overpriced, under-performing and sucky.
McNealy canceled Solaris for X86 and he kept pushing SPARC. Instead of doing a competitive Linux distro for SPARC hardware, he got himself very busy trying to undermine Linux on X86, and actively undermining Linux on SPARC. Result: no viable Linux on SPARC distro. Wasn't Sun in the business of selling SPARC hardware?
Fun fact: on the same exact Sun hardware Linux on SPARC was twice as fast as Solaris on SPARC. Linux on SPARC only had community support, while Solaris on SPARC was Sun's flagship product.
In 2003, I got myself a Pentium4 ThinkPad - IBM still made those back then - for $2500 that beat the crap out of a $40,000 Sun Ultra-80 with 2 UltraSPARC-II CPU's on performance. The ThinkPad - at home - was running RedHat 7.3 -- this is all before RedHat split into RHEL and Fedora. The Ultra-80 - at work - was running Solaris 8.
It doesn't take a genius to realize there's a big product viability problem here that can't be solved by firing people or by trash-talking your main competitor. See icon at right.
Meanwhile, McNealy kept talking about computers being like cars, about how Linux on X86 sucked, and about how Solaris on SPARC was the greatest thing since sliced bread. How did that turn out?
By the time Schwartz became CEO, Sun was already cooked. Schwartz was put in the CEO's chair to take the blame for McNealy's serial failures.