Scott McNealy woos India with Sun’s gospel

Circuit EC / New Delhi

Scott McNealy

As the US war machine rolled into Southern Iraq, Big Iron giant Sun Microsystems’ chairman, president and CEO, Scott McNealy got going on his first-ever visit to India. Even as many foreign business visitors cancelled their India visits citing the Iraq war, McNealy underlined the importance of the Indian market and mind share among developers for Sun Microsystems by going through with his visit.

The irrepressible McNealy, who can’t resist baiting Microsoft, continued in that vein throughout his India visit, while at the same time smartly making sales pitches for Sun. He wooed the government in Delhi, courted developers in Bangalore and waltzed with the cream of Indian industry in Mumbai. In Delhi, McNealy also announced a mega donation of $300 million in kind to Indian educational institutions, a strategy that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has already used in India.

But more than Microsoft, what everyone seemed to be interested in was Sun’s Linux strategy, which is allegedly pretty much going nowhere, what with Linux increasingly becoming more and more robust and reliable and poaching on RISC-UNIX server territory. But McNealy vehemently disagreed with any such suggestion.

The Sun pasha compared Linux to a piston in a car engine, and said that as a systems company, Sun was engaged in selling the complete car, which included the piston, and not just the piston itself—Sun’s enterprise offerings could include Linux as a part of the solution. And when Indian journalists kept trying to catch him on Linux, he ended the debate by saying, “I don’t know why you are getting so fixated on a piston [Linux]. We sell cars [Solaris-SPARC], a guy buying a car isn’t going to start looking at the piston.”

He also reminded Indian users that with over 15,000 applications written for the Sun Solaris platform, Linux and other OSes had a long way to go before they caught up.

McNealy also spoke of Sun’s foray into thin-client desktops, which he saw as a viable alternative to Microsoft architecture. “We have a desktop stack coming out with Mad Hatter. We’ll have Mozilla, Evolution, StarOffice...it will be a complete thin desktop,” he explained.

And for anyone who felt that the thin-client was a dead horse, McNealy firmly said, “The thin client isn’t dead. I never said that it would take off by a particular date.” He explained that he didn’t make predictions and just pointed towards where technology was headed.

Intel’s 64-bit processor Itanium also came in for some McNealy-bashing. He claimed that Intel had no real-world implementations of Itanium, except in Intel labs and in some environments that needed high performance computing. “An incredible disaster from a very credible company,” was McNealy’s take on Itanium.

Replying to a question on whether Sun would diversify away from Big Irons, McNealy said there was no chance of that happening. “We are focused on servers, that’s what we do best and we are not going to get into businesses that are not part of our core competency.”

But while he went ballistic against Microsoft and Itanium, he deftly avoided any wisecracks on the recent case filed in a US court by an ex-Sun employee who claimed damages because he felt that Sun favoured Indian employees. McNealy said that Sun felt that there was no truth in any such allegation. Careful not to say anything that could be used as fodder in any such case, when asked about how he saw his Indian partners vis-à-vis others, he explained, “I’m not going to play favourites. We like all our partners. Our Indian partners are great but so are our partners elsewhere.”