[lbo-talk] Sun´s former CEO Scott McNealy, capitalism fanboi

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Jan 30 09:33:38 PST 2010


I'm so glad to see the end of Sun. That was a horrible company, and it's quite fitting that it should be devoured by Oracle. Orakaka -- as we always used to call it -- is the Jabba the Hutt of the tech sector, with a clunky top-heavy cobbled-together product overconsumed by hive-minded corporate bureaucrats with a deep love for the conventional choice and the path of least resistance -- the same class of people who kept IBM in the oxygen tent so long, with gear that was ten years out of date and software that was twenty years out of date.

I had a number of occasions over the years to do battle -- always on the losing side -- with pilotless remote-controlled drones from Sun, in the IETF. Sun was always like a Microsoft wannabe. McNealy's paeans to "the market" are the usual managerial bullshit -- Sun's whole game plan, like every other tech company's, was to become a monopoly as quickly as possible, and they were very happy to manipulate the standards process to that end.

Oh, and Java *really* bites the big one, with its pinch-faced type-checking Inspector Javert compiler and its Plato's Beard of abstraction layers. How many new abstraction layers can you fit between any two existing abstraction layers? Answer: we don't know yet.

But don't get me started.

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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com



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