BW1333 MAR 08,1998 8:00 PACIFIC 11:00 EASTERN
( BW)(THE-NEW-YORKER) Scott McNealy: The Anti-Gates
Business Editors
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 8, 1998--As the de-facto leader of a group of high-tech companies united in their opposition to Microsoft, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, seemed almost diplomatic as he strode into last week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Bill Gates and his company. Then he quickly reverted to form. Proving why he has emerged from a crowded field to become the most relentless and extravagant of all Microsoft critics, McNealy lambasted Gates as "the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age." McNealy has long been one of the most respected executives in Silicon Valley, but how did he become the anti-Gates?
As John Heileman reports in a Letter from Silicon Valley called "The Sun King" (March 16, 1998), Scott McNealy is an anomaly in the high-tech industry. Part of the reason lies in his own family background in the affluent suburbs of Detroit. McNealy's relations with his father, an automotive executive at the American Motors Corporation, were strained, but he learned from him a love of manufacturing -- and the fact that he never wanted to be a C.E.O. "My whole life I just wanted to be a chief operating officer, and then someday run my own little forty person tool-and-die shop," McNealy says. But Heileman writes that McNealy's "ambition, his competitiveness, and his propensity for workaholism...would all prove to be as severe as his father'shad been."
Since the early 90's McNealy's anti-Microsoft, anti-Windows, anti-P.C. message has made him into a sort of pied-piper, gadfly, and crusader -- even if the battle often seemed futile. But then came the Internet, and Java. In the three years since Sun unveiled the "write-once, run-anywhere" programming language -- one which could conceivably make Windows obsolete, "McNealy has made it one of technology's best-known brands, a unifying force in a fractious valley," Heileman writes, "and together with the rise of the Internet itself the most acute threat that Microsoft has yet faced." Gates's firm licensed Java, and, according to Sun, has been working to undermine it ever since. Silicon Valley was enthralled when McNealy filed suit against Microsoft last March, alleging trademark infringement, breach of contract, and unfair competition. "In this industry, people are used to treating Microsoft somewhat like the Mafia," Netscape's Marc Andreessen told Heileman. "You generally don't fuck with the Mafia."
Clearly McNealy cares little for the prevailing wisdom and style of the Gates dominated industry. He tells Heileman that the difference between Sun and its rivals, is the difference between a "car-manufacturer and a car-dealer." And, Sun's image, Heileman writes, is "preposterously sexy," in no small part due to McNealy's "exploiting the Valley's endemic fear and loathing of Gates to rally support for Java and Sun." Andy Bechtolsheim, who was one of Sun's co-founders and is now an executive at the networking giant Cisco Systems, tells Heileman, "Scott sincerely believes that this battle with Microsoft is a battle for the future of information technology in the next century. But Scott is very smart. He also knows it's good for business."
Even the response of his critics and competitors seems fuel for McNealy's fire. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates' deputy, and, in an irony that seems appropriate, a rival of McNealy's since their years at different prep schools outside Detroit through years at Harvard and Stanford, says of him and Sun: "Sun is just a very dumb company. We didn't come in there saying, Hallelujah, brother, we love you Sun, you're our boys!...Those sub-fifty IQ people at Sun who believe that are either uninformed, crazy, or sleeping. It makes me mad at McNealy that he takes part in that kind of corporate character aspersion." McNealy responds with calm satisfaction to charges that he behaves as if on a religious crusade: "In a hockey game, you try to get under
the skins of their best players, to try and get them off their game...If you get booed in an opposing arena, it doesn't bother you -- it charges you up. When Steve Ballmer says I'm wacko, I consider that a compliment."
The March 16th issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands on
Monday, March 9th.
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