by Just saw the end of Sun’s quarterly earnings announcements and the announcement that Scott McNealy stepped down as CEO to be replaced by Jon Schwartz.
To say the least, I am stunned at the moment. I never expected to see Scott step down. I’ll have to think on what this means for Sun, but I think it means good things. I think Jon can make changes that Scott couldn’t, because Scott was too emotionally invested, and it would be “against his nature” to do.
Probably some of the employee cuts that the Street has been asking for; Scott was always against them, Jon might be a little more willing to make strategic cuts.
Jon’s software background will probably equate to even more focus on software as differentiator, as opposed to SPARC as differentiator. Expect to see more AMD systems, better AMD support for Solaris, and probably more movement on the OpenSolaris front to try and win back marketshare from Linux.