The longtime CEO and founder of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy has been succeeded by the current COO Jonathan Schwartz after 22 years at the helm. This is part of the company’s succesion planning as McNealy now moves up to Chairman of Sun Microsystems and Sun Federal Inc.
Under the baby faced McNealy, Sun Micro Systems became a powerhouse as a vendor of both hardware and software for the enterprise (Solaris O/S, SPARC chip and the Sun servers). Although Gosling, Sheridan and Naughton are the fathers of the Java Programming Language, I have to say that McNealy made it all possible by giving the go signal for Project Green that spawned the language. He also helped popularize Sun’s slogan;”The Network Is The Computer.” Sun Microsystems was also close to buying or merging with Applea couple of times, but the deals always fell through.
After the dot.com bust of 2001, Sun Microsystems was never really able to recover from it’s previous gains during the bubble since the sales of it’s hardware slowed.
CNN Article here
Bio of Scott McNealyhere
Official Sun Statement here