Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Better at inventing stuff than making money ?

The phrase "better at inventing stuff than making money " might have been used to describe Xerox, post-Chester Carlson.
In fact, it appears in the good-bye memo of Scott McNealy to his staff at Sun Microsystems. ["McNealy noted Sun was sometimes better at inventing stuff than making money from its inventions like Sparc, Solaris and Java."]

Also of note:

"So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator.

(...)

"Sun did not cheat, lie, or break the rule of law or decency. While we enjoyed breaking the rules of conventional wisdom and archaic business practice, and for sure loved to win in the market, we did so with a solid reputation for integrity. Nearly three decades of competing without a notable incident of our folks going off course morally or legally. Not all executives and big companies are bad. Really. There are good companies out there. Special thanks to all of my employees for this. I never had to hide the newspaper in shame from my children."


See also


Who is Rick Clark?
[ The writer, Liz Ryan, created an example wherein the (hypothetical) resume writer was a former IBM employee, now trying to find a job with the acquirer of Sun Microsystems. ]

cross-reference

McNealy: Microsoft needs Sun to beat IBM and Red Hat [ McNealy speaking here yesterday [5 Oct 2004]at a Northwestern University event on entrepreneurship let the anti-Red Hat venom spurt. (...) "What's happened now is that the world is down to three operating systems," McNealy said, during his keynote. "That is Windows, Red Hat and Solaris." (...) When asked by a Northwestern student why Microsoft decided to make peace with Sun, McNealy drifted into odd territory. His basic claim was that Microsoft knew it needed some competition and that Sun was the lesser of all evils. This claim covers the operating system wars, desktop software and middleware. "Microsoft needed a partner," McNealy said. "Their customers wanted choice. One is an unstable molecule."

It can only be assumed that McNealy was referring to Linux with that last comment. Sadly, he moved away from the molecular analysis at that point.]

Also

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2005/06/microsoft-to-indemnify-partners-over.html

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