Working in the internet industry is certainly filled with hair-pulling stresses, but sometimes good things do happen. Today, I had lunch with Scott McNealy, the Chairman of Sun, along with my partner Chester and 5 other CxOs from other internet companies like Ebay Korea, NCSoft, and Haansoft. I was thrilled - for God's sake, what's the chance of an average Joe like me having lunch with the president of a $14 billion-a-year company?
McNealy visited Korea to deliver a keynote at KES 2007 and presumably to check up on his major clients, but he made time to talk with us, the CxOs of Korea's internet companies, because he believed companies like us were fast becoming his core customers. Sun is shifting its focus from selling-$50,000-apiece-servers business to helping out internet services that deal with lots of user-generated content.
I asked McNealy what's Sun's strategies for maximizing profits from the technologies that Sun invented and then later open-sourced, such as Solaris and Java. Hardware is fast becoming a cheap commodity, which means it's a price-driven market and people might use Sun's open source technologies but not necessarily buy Sun's rather expensive equipment. Almost all the startups I know use LAMP setup (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP), and not one of them runs Sun servers on their backend. To this question, McNealy said Sun's hardware business is flourishing with 15+ years of consecutive corporate profits (so in short, "Don't worry about how we make our money, coz it's my problem, and we happen to make gobs of money anyhow"). He also said that sharing a software technology and then tying up hardware with that software technology would be an evil strategy.
After today's meeting, I have great respect for him - instead of fishing in Mediterranean, this billionaire is out here talking to a guy from a 25-person company! Besides, he knew all the details about his company, down to all numbers and figures, and he carried the newest SPARC chips in his pocket. One last thing though: he still doesn't like Bill Gates that much.
Picture from Digital Times
I asked McNealy what's Sun's strategies for maximizing profits from the technologies that Sun invented and then later open-sourced, such as Solaris and Java. Hardware is fast becoming a cheap commodity, which means it's a price-driven market and people might use Sun's open source technologies but not necessarily buy Sun's rather expensive equipment. Almost all the startups I know use LAMP setup (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP), and not one of them runs Sun servers on their backend. To this question, McNealy said Sun's hardware business is flourishing with 15+ years of consecutive corporate profits (so in short, "Don't worry about how we make our money, coz it's my problem, and we happen to make gobs of money anyhow"). He also said that sharing a software technology and then tying up hardware with that software technology would be an evil strategy.
After today's meeting, I have great respect for him - instead of fishing in Mediterranean, this billionaire is out here talking to a guy from a 25-person company! Besides, he knew all the details about his company, down to all numbers and figures, and he carried the newest SPARC chips in his pocket. One last thing though: he still doesn't like Bill Gates that much.
