httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtymEbrgqOc
In this video, Scott McNealy and Ed Zander reflect on the 29th anniversary of the founding of Sun Microsystems. Recorded at the Churchill Club on February 24, 2011.
Watching this video was a bit cathartic for me. As Sun’s HPC Community manager, I spent the last 10 years of my life believing that we could help turn the company around through our efforts to build up high performance computing. We had our successes along the way, but it’s clear to me now that the company was taking on water the whole time.
When people ask me what happened to Sun Microsystems, I tell them that the world changed. And when I lost my job last year when Oracle took over, I wrote something down that helped me work it out:
“The world is different than I want it to be. I will adjust.”
As people, we can do that and move on with our lives. But the companies that don’t adjust? They risk ending up as the subject of massively rationalized nostalgia.
