Hyper-aggressive leadership. Sun CEO Scott McNealy is no shrinking violet, but does he have the muscle to annihilate all known impediments to Sun’s profitability and long-term success? If Arnold Schwarzenegger is good enough to be the governor of Silicon Valley’s home state and have HP’s CEO, Carly Fiorina, on his transition team, then clearly fellow Hollywood BWBP&B (bloke with big pecs and biceps) Sylvester Stallone is right for Sun’s top job.
By using his bare hands to take out Steven Milunovich, that Wall Street weasel from Merrill Lynch & Co, Sly would sparc some right thinking among stupid analysts who can’t see the clarity in Sun’s strategies (see pages 12 & 21). In an open letter to McNealy, Milunovich recently had the gall to suggest that Sun de-emphasise its Sparc hardware architecture and focus on the Intel x86 platform, lose a further 5000 to 7000 staff, spin off its Java programming language, forget battling Microsoft on the desktop with the newly announced Java Desktop System, and focus on creating mission-critical systems where it can add value through innovation around the Solaris OS and Orion platform, blades, and the N1 networking technology and services. Nobody would send more than one open letter to Sly.
While a lily-livered Sun representative said the company would not comment on Milunovich’s specific recommendations, it’s true that Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of Sun Software, was not so shy. Schwartz opined that “Mr Milunovich is a fan of theatrics and I don’t think Steve understands the industry very well.” But Sly would deal with such crap at source: starting with an analyst cull, quickly rolling on to surgical strikes on Linux vendor HQs (and IBM just to be sure), and tactical mop-up operations like lobbing rocket grenades wherever rival server hardware is made. It would be unrealistic to expect all of this to happen in a movie length 108 minutes, but one fiscal quarter would be more than enough time.
Sun would shine; all the rest would be blinded by Sylvester’s light.