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Linux-loving McNealy dons penguin outfit

By Stephen Shankland, CNet, 8 February, 2002 13:48

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Servers, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Linux, Scott McNealy, penguin, Tux

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In a move to erase doubts about the sincerity of Sun Microsystems' move to embrace the Linux operating system, chief executive Scott McNealy took the stage on Thursday wearing a penguin suit. "We love Linux, and I hope there isn't any doubt about it," McNealy told financial analysts at its annual meeting here, dressed as Tux, the seemingly innocuous penguin mascot chosen years ago by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. "Lou Gerstner didn't have to do this. If I just say we're going to spend a billion dollars on this, can I take this off?" said a sweltering McNealy, referring to IBM's loud move to spend vast sums of money on Linux in 2001. The stunt drew gales of laughter from analysts sobered by gloomy realities such as a recession, a shrinking market for Sun's range of servers and several unprofitable quarters at Sun. Sun long has viewed Linux as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it is similar to the Solaris version of Unix that powers most of Sun's servers and has drawn programmers' attention away from Microsoft. On the other hand, Linux has been encroaching on Sun's turf, with even Sun acknowledging it cutting into low-end server sales in April 2000. And Sun prefers to own and control its intellectual property, a task impossible with the culture of shared contributions that underlies Linux. What a difference two years makes in revising corporate thinking, when competitors IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer and Dell all increased their support for Linux. In January 2000, Sun chief operating officer Ed Zander ridiculed IBM for its Linux push, saying Big Blue was just latching onto the latest fad. "It's amazing to watch IBM chase down the Linux path the way they did Windows four years ago," he said. "We have no plans to do Linux inside the company as an operating system." But Sun's thinking hasn't completely changed. Sun still doesn't see Linux used in its "vertical" products, the large, expensive, complicated servers such as the new Sun Fire 15K that is crammed with dozens of processors. "We are committed to this as a low-end, edge-of-the-network strategy," McNealy said at the analyst conference. Sun will create its own version of Linux, not use products from Linux sellers such as Red Hat, Caldera International, SuSE, MandrakeSoft or Turbolinux. Linux raises a difficult issue for Sun's years-old sales pitch that programmers should embrace Sun because their software will run unchanged across its entire product line, possible because Sun has a single chip and a single operating system. Indeed, moments after advocating Linux at Sun, McNealy showed a mock advertisement disparaging IBM and bragging about Sun's single-OS, single-chip strategy. With Linux in the mix, Sun now has to worry about making sure the numerous components in its Sun One software strategy run on Linux as well as Java, a task Sun said it will accomplish. The company is part-way there, with support for Java, the Forte programming tools and some of the iPlanet e-commerce software. Some Sun competitors with more years of Linux experience took the opportunity to welcome Sun into the fold while taking jabs at Sun's products. "It's good to see Sun finally recognise Linux as a viable business platform," HP Linux Business Strategist Mike Balma said on Thursday, three years after HP embraced Linux. "Though they're a little late to the game, any time is a good time to offer your customers choice and move away from a solely proprietary environment." In his speech on Thursday, McNealy also drubbed Microsoft for its effort to improve security. "I didn't have to write a memo to my team saying, 'Hey, team, security is important.' I'd be embarrassed," McNealy said. "That's built into Solaris." McNealy raised the issue of a private antitrust suit against Microsoft -- a move AOL Time Warner has made -- but declined to say what the company will do. "We're evaluating and looking at all our options," he said. McNealy has a warmer relationship with Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, a fellow Microsoft-basher who a week ago advocated using lots of little Intel servers instead of big Unix servers such as those Sun sells. Ellison said his company is moving its core operations to Linux on cheap Intel servers. "Larry will do anything for a quote," quipped McNealy. "He's just trying to make a point" (that small servers are a strategy). But Ellison knows that mammoth servers are also necessary and are where Oracle gets most of its money, McNealy said. "I know vertical scaling is never going to go away in our careers," he said. McNealy also boasted of Sun's research and development. The company spent $2bn on it last year, he said. Over the decade, "We're going to spend $20bn to $30bn minimum on R&D." Part of that R&D funding is going to Sun's N1 plan to pool thousands of computers and storage systems into a single, gigantic virtual computer. McNealy said N1 won't require a Sun-only data centre. "You can't plug somebody else's...machines into it. It'll be multivendor, multiplatform. It'll have different storage, different switches, different servers," he said.
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