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High Noon

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High Noon

The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

A cautionary tale to start-ups: Sun Microsystem boomed only after its founder was replaced as CEO by the now ubiquitous Scott McNealy.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

Author Karen Southwick reveals how a few kids from Stanford University turned Sun Microsystems into a $10 billion industry powerhouse. This incredibly detailed book revisits many of the key moments in Sun’s history, leading up to the recent excitement over the Java programming language. The author shows how Scott McNealy’s unique personal style played an instrumental part in Sun’s direction. Despite McNealy’s prominence in the book, this is really a saga about Sun Microsystems and the technology economy. While she makes some effort to provide McNealy’s biography, the author is clearly more interested in the strategic corporate moves Sun made to position itself for the future. getAbstract recommends this book as essential reading for anyone in the early stages of a technology start-up, and fascinating reading for anyone even slightly interested in business.

Summary

In the Beginning

Even as a teenager in New Delhi, India, Vinod Khosla knew he wanted to start his own company. After failing with a start-up in his homeland, Khosla brought his electrical engineering degree to the United States. He arrived during the late 1970s, when Silicon Valley was developing into a Mecca for entrepreneurs. Khosla got his M.B.A. at Stanford in 1980 and a university connection helped him start Daisy Systems, a computer-aided design (CAD) company. Daisy sputtered after a promising start, but the experience gave Khosla the motivation to start Sun. At the time, engineers shared time on a large minicomputer when doing CAD. Khosla envisioned a system where an engineer could use an individual, relatively inexpensive, computer connected to an "Ethernet" network like one he had seen at Stanford.

Khosla had a chance meeting with Andy Bechtolsheim - a graduate student at the Stanford University Network (SUN) project - and realized that together they could make his vision a reality. Their six-page business plan, dated Feb. 12, 1982, described how they would build and sell the SUN workstation. At $25,000 to $100,000, workstations were smaller, cheaper and more...

About the Author

Karen Southwick is a managing editor at Forbes ASAP She is the author of Silicon Gold Rush.

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