Bright, some clouds
Sun Microsystems’ big computers are the hardware of choice for the Internet, but the Silicon Valley firm has powerful enemies
ED ZANDER, the chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, remembers 1995 as a difficult year. “We were flatlined. ‘Wintel' [the combination of Windows software with Intel chips] was going to be the architecture for business and that was that.” For a company so comprehensively written off by its own people, Sun today looks in remarkably good health. An incidental bonus for the firm's famously belligerent chief executive, Scott McNealy: the revenues of Microsoft, Sun's arch-foe and Wintel's creator, are slowing as it flails against the antitrust case that Sun vociferously backed.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Bright, some clouds”
From the August 19th 2000 edition
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