[JAVAONE] Scott McNealy Keynote
I had never heard him speak - He's a lot of fun to listen to - funny and with a sense of his audience. This was a shorter keynote then yesterday. This wasn't the kind of rah-rah motivational speech that I was expecting. He did drive home a few points, clearly showing what he was most interested in us taking away:
Takeaway 1: Scott wants us to believe that Sun is highly viable. They will not be going away. $4 Billion in the bank, etc. Unit sales are growing - at least over the last 3 Quarters.
Takeaway 2: Scott wants us to know that Sun’s support of Java is unwavering. It is very expensive but it does help them to sell hardware. Sun is very keen on supporting the Java community and to ensure that no-one wonders whether Java is really behind us.
As he known for, Scott then launched into his 'rants' although they really were really quite tame. Here is what he is _' outraged' _over:
Where 's the outrage on the proposal that companies be forced to expence stock options? [I don't know - I don't understand the issues well enough but if Warren Buffet thinks its a good idea to force companies to treat the value of stock options as expenses, then it can't be that outragous.]
Where 's the outrage on viruses? [The angle here of course is that supposedly viruses only affect Microsoft systems, Java based systems. Even if this where true, I am not sure it says anything, given the disparity of the installed bases.]
Where 's the outrage on IBM pressuring Sun to Open Source Java? After all Sun has historically submitted more to Open Source than any other company – let them open source their own stuff. [Hmm, what about Eclipse?]
Some factoids:
600 million Java smartcards shipped
650 million PCs shipped with J2SE
"Who else has done smart card to mars rover compatibility” (which is a pretty impressive statement, except, why would you want that?)