Surprisingly, perhaps, it is technology innovation that seems to be the burr under Scott McNealy’s saddle. The Sun Microsystems Inc chief claims that the good exciting source code is coming these days from Hewlett-Packard Co, the Open Software Foundation and his own SunSoft Inc – and not Unix System Laboratories Inc. As for breaking away from a Novell Inc-owned Unix, he says that cannot happen – there is no place to break way to. He reckons that in the future, the world’s management information system departments are going to juggle two environments, Microsoft Corp Windows NT and Unix and that the real loser is all of this is IBM’s OS/2. McNealy says he is perfectly willing for the Windows New Technology operating system to go on the Sparc RISC if Microsoft wants to do the work. He is willing to throw in a couple of technical support people to explain to Bill Gates how Sparc works, and he will even sell naked hardware on an OEM basis to the likes of Dell Computer Corp or Electronic Design Systems. He is just not willing to put the product into his price book. He says he is equally willing to do the same for any other operating system. McNealy also told our sister paper Unigram.X that he is delighted with the amount of advertising and sense of energy and power that the Novell acquisition of Unix Labs will create for Unix System V.4. He is unsure of the philosophical position that Novell will take and reckons it could be a year before the industry knows for sure. On the other hand, he has a great deal of confidence in Ray Noorda’s intellectual prowess and innate capitalism to deliver what Sun needs from Unix Labs as Unix Labs’s largest customer: low royalities, available source code, open interfaces, technological innovation and resolution of any channel conflict with SunSoft.
