Comment Articles

The wit and wisdom of Scott McNealy

David Berlind AnchorDesk

Published: 07 Jan 2002 16:11 GMT

In his public appearances, Sun Microsystems chief executive Scott McNealy rarely misses the opportunity to twist at least one competitor's product or technology name into a derisive pun.

But it's McNealy's delivery that adds punch to the pun: some deliberate stammering as if groping for the name, and then feigning innocence when he "corrects" himself and finally utters the real name. But there's meaning behind McNealy's malapropisms, with his quips usually signalling what's on his radar. The following McNealy-isms came up during his interview with Tech Update's David Berlind.

.NOT -- McNealy's nickname for Microsoft's .NET architecture.

According to McNealy, there are only two IT architectures for the future, and technology decision makers will have to pick one: Microsoft's .NET or Sun's Java-based Sun ONE. But, predictably, McNealy doesn't think .NET is all that it's cracked up to be. First, he considers the technology to be inferior, especially when it comes to security. More importantly, he says it's a poor strategic choice because those who opt for .Net now will later regret the limitations of its proprietary nature, and will ultimately be locked into Microsoft technology. That kind of dependence, says McNealy, will take away your control over the total cost of technology ownership and hand it over to Microsoft -- a risky proposition.

Itanic -- McNealy's interpretation of Intel's Itanium.

Itanium is the first and currently only available version of Intel's 64-bit processor architecture known as IA-64. IA-64 is based on a technology known as Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) that is considered by some to be a superior technology to RISC-based processors. All other 64-bit processors, including Sun's SPARC processors, are RISC-based.