刀枪Blue

Thank you, Mr. McNealy

谁是带面具的传奇？

他是普通人不了解的另一个 Miracle。
最最开始，我还是学生的时候，在图书馆3楼图书阅览室的 每周电脑报 的 克丽观察 专栏知道了 Scott McNealy 这个人－－不知道为什么记得这么清楚，我就是对细节的记性太好太好了，身边的人都发现了，当然，这也是我痛苦的原因－－尽管过去有4,5,年时间了，我还清楚地记得专栏编辑说，Scott McNealy 每次来北京每次出场，都能带来新观点，新东西－－这是我对 McNealy 的第一认识。而后随着知识增长，眼界开阔，了解 SUN，了解 McNealy 越来越多，知道的典故也越来越多，从 DotCom 泡沫时候网线1米8美元，键盘1个120美元的工作站，到让 techie 激动的 OpenSolaris，这个人和这个公司扮演的不同于 Micrsoft ，不同于 Intel，不用于 IBM，不同于 Oracle，不同于 Google 的角色让人印象深刻，深刻。

51岁的 McNealy 交棒给 40 岁扎辫子的的 Jonathan Schwartz 让人自作多情地生出教父更替似的悲壮感觉，不论雄浑的乐曲篇章有多长，弹完最后一个音符该翻要翻不得不翻的时候，那个动作会轻得快得弹指一挥得让人难过。
McNealy 是和 Vinod Khosla，Bill Joy 以及 Andy Bechtolsheim 共同创办的 SUN 。他们的公司里总是涌现天才和天才产品，这样一家娱乐自己，娱乐大家的公司，谁会不喜欢呢？McNealy 本人自有特色不逊其他硅谷明星人物，他常出现的样子是T恤，休闲装衬衣，牛仔裤或休闲裤，不爱浮华爱实打。虽不是技术人员出身，不过和从 Bill Joy 这样的大师人物到基层工程师都搭档十分愉快，而且对他们表现出了“杰出”的尊重与信赖。正如前面我记得的编辑所言，这个聪明绝顶高中SAT数学满分800的家伙也是媒体的最爱，PR 场合常有妙语，省了不少记者挠头想报道标题的麻烦。

McNealy 在他22年领导Sun的生涯中，对 计算，芯片，Internet，Open Source，Java 作出了改变历史的贡献。他退出舞台了，和他竞技多年的 Super CEO 们，Bill，Larry，你们不觉得独孤求败的失落吗？

老牌记者 Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols 在 McNealy 卸任之际写了篇 Thank you, Mr. McNealy ，权作纪念。
虽不是泪水涟涟，好歹也是情真意切，再翻译的话恐丢了味道，就这么看吧。

Thank you, Mr. McNealy

by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Never forget that while he was unable to right Sun in recent years, McNealy wasn’t just an industry giant. He changed the IT world forever. In 1982, Scott McNealy founded Sun Microsystems with three graduate student friends — Andy Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, and Vinod Khosla from Stanford University.

I doubt they knew they were making history.

Sun’s first workstation was in many ways the world’s first workstation. The Motorola 68000-powered Sun-1 had a network protocol, TCP/IP; a slogan, “the network is the computer”; and an operating system, briefly a port of Version 7 Unix, to be followed quickly by the open-source version 4.1 BSD Unix. This soon became known as SunOS.

The computing world would never be the same.

With that one system, which would launch a billion-dollar-plus enterprise, the foundation network protocol of the Internet was laid. Other companies would also make TCP/IP popular. Sun made it the heart of the Internet.

Workstations, while never as popular as PCs, would for decades be the defining platform of scientists, engineers, and high-end design. When I started working on the Internet in the ’80s, we didn’t use PCs. We, all of us, used workstations, and most of them were made by Sun.

And, while Sun has had its ups and downs with open source, by using BSD Unix it set in motion a culture of bright, inquisitive developers who would eventually turn the software world upside down with open source.

Under McNealy, Sun grew to be a computer hardware giant. Then, when PCs began to erode Sun’s market share, he presided over the transformation of Sun from the workstation company of choice into being the high-end server power.

With the rise of the dot-coms, Sun rose to its zenith.

Always colorful — to put it mildly — McNealy would war with his fellow IT super-CEOs such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates. He was never able to unseat Gates as the top dog of technology, but no one gave it a better, or more spectacular, try.

Unfortunately, while the fall of the dot-coms didn’t destroy Sun, it did almost bring the company to its knees.

McNealy, still energetic, still striving for the top, now ruled over a company that, in its frantic efforts to capture its glory days, kept trying one approach after another — network computers, Linux-powered appliances, and Java.

Some of them — such as the wasted $2 billion purchase of Linux-powered Cobalt Networks in 2000 — only hurt the company. Others, such as the very popular Java programming language, have been technological success stories, but have done relatively little to help Sun’s bottom line.

McNealy was correct when he said, on announcing that he was leaving the role of CEO, that “The time is right. Our product line is fixed … our customers are probably happier with us than they have been in years.”

But it was the stockholders, who watched Sun’s losses mount to more than $4 billion between 2002 and 2005, who were doubtlessly the happiest with the change.

That McNealy would announce that he was leaving Sun on the tail end of a quarter that saw losses of $217 million, or 6 cents a share, compared with a loss of $28 million, or 1 cent a share, in the year-ago quarter, was only too appropriate. It was not the technology that had failed McNealy; it was a technology market that he no longer mastered.

The driving man who had led Sun to the heights in the ’80s and ’90s was not the man who could lead Sun back to the top in the ’00s.

I will miss McNealy. Some may say he won’t really go. That he’ll still pull Sun’s strings as the chairman of the board. I don’t see that. I see him riding off into the sunset. His day, I’m sorry to say, has passed.

But let us not forget, let us never forget, that without Scott McNealy we would have neither the Internet nor the open source that powers so much of it.

Hyperbole? I don’t think so.

I was there in the early days. When the Internet moved from college computer rooms into every home. When open source moved from being an academic curiosity to being a driving engine of software.

As I think of those days, I see Sun workstations and servers — pizza boxes, we called them — running SunOS and Solaris, knitting the Net together. I see programmers tinkering with Unix on SPARCstations and wondering what they could do if only they had the source code. I see, in short, our modern computing world as an infant.

Thank you, Mr. McNealy, thank you.

[tags]story, sun, scott mcnealy[/tags]

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