Interview with Scott McNealy – Part 2

Following up from Part 1 of the interview, in this second installment, Scott McNealy discusses his views on open source, what he’s most proud of in his career and what he would have liked to have done differently.

Q. I saw Andy do a presentation in the EBC a few weeks ago. The customer was blown away. I probably only understood about 1/10 of what Andy was saying. But it was still impressive.

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.

Q. What do you think of open source and its impact on the industry?

If you Google “Scott McNealy and software,” I was saying software would go to free seven or eight years ago. We were talking about how it’s going to happen. When we started Sun we were the original Red Hat of Berkeley Unix a long time ago. I consider Bill Joy the father of open source with the Berkeley Software license and the BSD software release. We did it with NFS, with Unix, with Java. Sharing has been our corporate strategy since February 24, 1984. So it’s something we’ve been doing forever. 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.

I also believe 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. 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. It allows people to get easier access to the technology. You can do the experimentation and implementation without having to get a purchase order. As Jonathan says, it allows zero cost of customer acquisition. We’re getting 70,000 downloads per day on average for MySQL. And we don’t even advertize. It’s just word of mouth.

Q. What are you most proud of in your career?

I’m most proud of the passion and energy around the Sun community. Not just our employees who bust their butt and do a great job. 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.

Q. What would you have liked to have done differently over the years?

Everybody wants to know the mistakes I made. I tend to block them out and rationalize! I made a few promotion mistakes. I tended to keep people too long in their jobs. Strategically, I guess the biggest mistake is we should have done x64 software earlier. We tried doing Solaris on x86 as a software-only product thinking that Dell, IBM and HP would be more supportive if we didn’t compete with them in hardware. But it’s only after we did the hardware that they then started to OEM Solaris and support it across the board. Now we have over 1,000 systems supporting Solaris. The chip multi-threaded (CMT) SPARC product continues to grow like crazy, so it hasn’t hurt our traditional business. In fact, it’s created a whole new market opportunity.

I wish we had gotten to open source a little sooner. But we did a deal with AT&T on Unix System V release 4 that encumbered Solaris. So it took us a while to get back to our roots, which we did by open sourcing Solaris. People think that was a mistake, but I’m still glad we did the unification of Unix.