I sat down with Scott McNealy today after he spoke on a panel here at TUCON, the Tibco annual conference here in Las Vegas.
McNealy covers a lot of topics. He discusses his new startup WayIn that provides a corporate social media experience. He jokingly says Larry (Ellison) never calls, referring to Oracle, which acquired Sun Microsystems, the company he co-founded.
Later in the interview we got into the topic of open source. That’s where it gets interesting. He says the tech world no longer has a major corporate supporter for open source. Further, purchasing agents and IT managers are not quantifying the “barrier to exit.” He means that IT is not taking into account what the true cost of total ownership is when they buy from a product company that sells proprietary technology.
I think people need to think about the lifecycle of technology products.
McNealy is so right on. His remarks should give pause to anyone considering buying a closed technology product especially in this time when the vendor marketing band is pushing customers to invest in entirely new infrastructures and a host of products and services with such long-term implications.
Wayin, a Denver-based social engagement service. Founded in November 2010 by Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy and Scott Johnston, and led by CEO Tom Jessiman, Wayin is a mobile and online service that generates “one-to-many” conversations between individuals, brands, enterprises, schools and public sector agencies with their fans, customers, communities and citizens. It can be accessed online at http://www.wayin.com, by downloading the Wayin app for iPhone or Android, or integrated into a brand’s existing mobile app, on its website through...
Scott McNealy is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, the computer technology company he started in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. Sun Microsystems, along with companies such as Silicon Graphics, 3Com, and Oracle Corporation, was part of a wave of successful startup companies in California’s Silicon Valley during the early and mid-1980s. In 1982, McNealy, who was then manufacturing director at Onyx Systems, a vendor of microprocessor-based Unix systems, was approached by fellow Stanford alumnus Khosla...
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