Scott McNealy

Achievement

One of the four founders of Sun Microsystems Inc.

Biography

Earned his degrees at Harvard University, BA, 1976 and Stanford University, MBA, 1980.

Scott McNealy is the well-known Chairman, President and CEO of Sun Microsystems, the computer technology company he co-founded 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 second wave of successful startup companies in California's Silicon Valley during the early and mid-1980s. (1)

Since taking the reins as CEO in 1984, McNealy has steered Sun to constant growth and innovation. Throughout his career, McNealy has trained his focus on maintaining and growing Sun's reputation as a constant innovator and strong competitor.(2)

Unlike most people involved in high technology industries, Scott McNealy did not come from the world of amateur programmers, hackers, and computer scientists. Instead, his background is from the business end, having graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA. At Stanford University, McNealy met Khosla, Joy, and Bechtolsheim and helped provide the necessary organizational and business leadership for the fledgling Sun Microsystems. Those two formative years on "the farm" soon spawned a little startup known as SUN, originally an acronym for the Stanford University Network.(2) McNealy is one of the few CEOs of a major corporation to have had a tenure of over twenty years.(1)

McNealy's ideas about computing often predate industry trends. For more than a decade, he has been advancing Sun's slogan, The Network Is The Computer -- a succinct statement of the company's vision of seamless connectivity.(2)

McNealy is an amateur ice hockey player.

McNealy is well-known for his adversarial relationship with Microsoft and its co-founder Bill Gates, about which he regularly makes provocative statements.

Family: Son of Raymond William McNealy and Marmaline, married Susan Ingemanson, 1994; children: four.

Address: Sun Microsystems, 4150 Network Circle, Santa Clara, California 95054; http://www.sun.com.

McNealy was an early advocate of the networked environment. At times, he has been known to be skeptical of products that don't integrate well with networked environments.

A recent example of McNealy's criticism was the Apple iPod. According to The Register, a United Kingdom-based technology magazine, McNealy said, "There's a pendulum thing where stuff is on the client side and then goes back into the network where it belongs," the magazine quoted him as saying. "The answering machine put voicemail by the desk, and then it went back into the network." He continued, "Your iPod is like your home answering machine. I guarantee you it will be hard to sell an iPod five or seven years from now when every cell phone can access your entire music library wherever you are."

Chronology

1954 born in Columbus Indiana, USA

1976 Harvard University BA

1980 Stanford University MBA

1982 cofounded SUN with three others

1982–1984 vice president

1984–1999 chairman, president, and chief executive officer manufacturing and operations

1994 married Susan Ingemanson

1999–2002 chairman and chief executive officer

2002–2004 chairman, president, and chief executive officer

2004– chairman and chief executive officer.

Honors and awards

Bibliography