Mcnealy Quotes

You already have zero privacy. Get over it! --Scott McNealy CEO Sun Microsystems 1999

You may be horribly wrong and need to bail on it. As Scott McNealy famously said, “fail fast”—the sooner the better. We sometimes use the expression “that dog won't hunt”—not in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn't working, no matter what we do. It's hard to say that if you're irrationally attached to a strategy.

Sun had hit $1 billion in sales within four years. McNealy did it by smartly targeting a customer base that had money to spend—corporate R&D departments, the U.S. military, and the National Laboratories, a less glamorous but much more affluent set of customers than the universities Steve went after. Sun next went after Wall Street, which was just beginning to discover the power of using computers to identify quick trading opportunities. These customers didn’t much care what the computers looked like, as long as they had big screens and could handle multiple computing threads simultaneously. Sun succeeded by identifying the market’s real need, by delivering just that product, and by keeping its machines reasonably affordable. NeXT failed at all of that. In fact, NeXT didn’t actually sell its first computer until almost a year after that splashy debut in Davies Hall—four full years after Steve had started the company.

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. Scott McNealy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems