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

[Michael Smith]

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out of date and software that was twenty years out of date.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. 

-- 

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