Sun King Powered By ‘Over-Arching’ Desire to Eliminate the Digital Divide

By Stephen Foley

4.30am

Scott McNealy retired last year. Now he’s busier than ever.

Bleary-eyed, he rouses himself from another night in a strange bed, this time in a hotel on the edge of Mumbai, India. He is here on the last stretch of his latest Asia tour, one of dozens he has taken since stepping down as chief executive of the company he helped found 25 years ago. These days, the 52-year-old is "only" the chairman of Sun Microsystems, but if he had imagined for a second this would be just an honorary post then he is thinking again this morning. Who knows what time-zone his body is telling him he is in? He has been flying the wrong way round the world (from the west coast of the US to Japan and then to India, "into the jet stream instead of with", way too slow) and he will be on a plane again in another hour – next stop, Bangalore.

8.30am

The traffic is – how to put it? – impressive. Mr McNealy and his advisers are crawling through Bangalore towards a developers’ conference for software engineers working with Sun’s Java computing language. In an up-and-down-and-on-the-way-up-again history, where Sun has developed and sold everything from giant computers to microchips to operating system software, Java is one of the company’s enduring creations, with a vast array of uses including on 90 per cent of the world’s cell-phones.

Mr McNealy is going to be talking about how Java is an example of Sun’s commitment to open-source technology – whose building blocks are not kept secret, copyrighted and sold, but published for all to see and use. Sun makes its money from services and other products sold to those who are using its creations – not as profitable as the copyrighting model, maybe, but Mr McNealy says it spurs innovation. The group has also just adopted an open-source strategy for its computer operating system, Solaris, which it hopes will be an increasingly significant rival to the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows. "

We are not Microsoft, we’re not Intel in terms of their operating margins, which are just outrageous. But we have reasonable margins. There aren’t many companies founded since 1982 that are bigger than us or more successful than us. There are oceans-ful of carcasses laying on the bottom that weren’t able to compete. Too many people think they are going to be the next Microsoft and own and control the next pro-prietory standard, and that seems like a high-risk way to win. It feels to me that a sharing, open, multi-vendor strategy is much more durable, because we can stand on the shoulders of everybody else’s investment and partnership. We have 1,700 companies in the Java community process, all helping to make Java better."

It is back to Sun’s roots, Mr Mc-Nealy says, pointing out its first operating systems back in the Eighties were based on the Unix open-source technology. "I may sound a little Al Goreish here, but we kinda invented open source."

2pm

After lunch with Sun’s management in India, it is time for a series of customer meetings, and another lot of running around. It’s an exhausting schedule and it is not the sort of trip you can make unless you are pretty fit, Mr Mc-Nealy says. (Ice hockey is his sport of choice – but it has its risks. Just a few days after returning from India, he slammed, feet first, into the boards during a game and is now hobbling about on crutches. He wouldn’t have been able to do India in that condition.)

It is shaping up to be a successful afternoon. Sun had a fallow period following 2000′s dotcom bust. The new internet companies did not need all the Sun servers they had bought and a second-hand market sprang up, and in the meantime new players like Google preferred to string together lots of cheaper parts than to buy Sun’s kit to power their computing empire.

Now, Mr McNealy imagines a future where internet firms may not even have their own banks of computers, instead just renting their storage and computing power. "Greg Papadopoulos [Sun's chief technology officer] likes to talk about the fact there will only be six computers left at some point on the planet, very large grids owned and operated probably by the big telecoms companies. We want to be the arms supplier to all those major grids."

4.30pm

A "town hall meeting" with some of Sun’s 1,500 employees in India, and a chance to mull over the contradictions of developing economies, a digital divide growing as millions of people push into the middle classes, but threequarters of the world’s population still do not have internet access.

"One way to bridge the divide is to give everybody a Dell PC, but I think if we turned on 6 billion Dell PCs tomorrow all running Microsoft … well, first of all there aren’t enough systems administrators to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Secondly, you think we’ve got a global warming carbon emissions problem now, Kyoto will be 6ft under water in a heartbeat if we turned on 6 billion Dells every morning. The other way is to do it through network computing, where you have very small, thin devices like cell-phones and kiosks and other shared resources all connected to these six big grid computers."

6.45pm

Time to check in with Jonathan Schwartz, Mr McNealy’s longtime No 2, to whom he ceded the chief executive job last year. "We do dozens of emails a day, usually a phone call a day, we try to meet once a week in person, but he’s running the joint, he hires and fires everybody. I’m chairman of the board, so I have board responsibilities, but other than that I work for him."

11.30pm

A final after-dinner speech concluded, there is one last crawl across Bangalore (you wouldn’t believe the traffic at midnight) and one last strange bed – up the front of another commercial flight – before a welcome return to his family, to the four sons he has named after cars, Maverick, Dakota, Colt and Scout.

Mr McNealy will have clocked up 40,000 miles on this one-week trip. His thoughts, as his head hits the standard-issue airline pillow, will be turning to the next visits – Europe and later Washington DC – rather than to those halcyon early days, when Sun was a pioneering upstart, built by four friends out of a project at California’s Stanford University, and when this multibillion-dollar future lay before it.

"I figure there will be time to reminisce some day when I’m an old guy. I’m so excited about making Jonathan the most successful CEO in the history of the computer industry and eliminating the digital divide. As corny as that sounds, we’re actually dead serious about it. Sure it’s over-arching and a little arrogant of us, maybe, to say we can make that big a difference on the planet, but what the heck, why not try? Besides, I’ve four little boys, I don’t want them seeing me sitting around eating potato chips saying: ‘Look at the pictures of daddy on the covers of magazines from the old days’."

Scott McNealy, retire to the sofa? Not likely.