McNealy-isms

Scott McNealy, pictured below with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, stepped down from his role as CEO of Sun Microsystems. Sun is a technology company in a lot of trouble right now.

McNealy was never shy. I remember meeting him in Toronto a few years back. His opening line to me: “If the banks aren’t dot.com they’re dot.gone.” Just for the record, the banks are doing much, much better than Sun.

A friend of mine passed me a list of Scott McNealy-isms. Here are a few of them. And remember, this guy was leading a multi-billion dollar operation.

• “Probably the most dangerous and powerful industrialist of our age.” (Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates)
• “Ballmer and Butt-Head.” (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Gates)
• “A giant hair ball.” (Microsoft’s Windows and Windows NT)
• “General and motors.” (Microsoft and Intel)
• “Windows More Errors” (Windows ME)
• “Look Out” (Microsoft’s Outlook)
• “The Corvair of Web servers, unsafe at any speed” (Internet Information Server)
• “Captive Directory” (Active Directory)
• “.Not,” “.Not Yet” and “.Nut” (Microsoft’s .Net development strategy)
• “The beast from Redmond” and “the evil empire.” (Microsoft and its headquarters)
• “Only a monopolist could study a business and ruin it by giving away products.”
• “Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system. I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology, too.”
• “I’ve always argued the best way to keep your teenager off drugs is buy him a Pentium Pro, give him NT and Microsoft Office and a printer, and tell him you get $500 if you can print something out of PowerPoint on that printer. That will take him six months of drug-free activity. I think that’s probably the best thing you could possibly do for your teenager.”
• “The visual I see is a slow-motion collision of two garbage trucks–and they are just about to meet bumpers.” (On the prospects for the Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merger.)
• “Is there a McNealy’s law? Yeah, that’s ‘eat lunch or be lunch.’ Or if you’re in academia, ‘do lunch, or be lunch.’