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JAVA BARKER
COMPANY Sun Microsystems, Chairman and CEO
NET WORTH $1 billion
AGE 45
E-MAIL scott.mcnealy@eng.sun.com
BIO McNealy, the leader of Silicon Valley's Everyone-but-Bill alliance, may have
finally found the best partner of all in his war against Microsoft this year. He
teamed up with America Online to divvy up the rebel forces of Netscape. Now, with
aol's millions of consumers as a ready test bed for new technologies coming out
of Sun's labs, he's actually poised to bypass Redmond's lock on the computer
desktop. And not a moment too soon. In 1998 McNealy popped up in Congress and the
courts, defensively painting Gates & Co. as monopolists who blocked competitors
and "polluted" the Java programming language. But Sun's stock sat in the
doldrums. McNealy's not one to keep complaining. In August, Sun bought Star
Division, a German software firm that makes applications software that competes
with Microsoft's popular Office package. And as the Netscape-aol deal kicks in,
Sun's shares have soared like the dot-coms that use its hardware and software.
McNealy is nothing if not a battle-hardened veteran. He even began his career on
a factory floor, turning out tanks on a San Jose assembly line. His rep as an
operations whiz and Stanford ties landed him a top job at Sun, which was then
just starting up as a maker of computer work stations, challenging the hegemony
of mainframes. McNealy has proved himself time and again. And Sun's valuation is
sitting pretty at $60 billion--a fourfold increase over last year.
BEST LINE " I've yet to hear [a customer] say, 'Oh, darn, I plugged it in and it
worked. I hate that.'"
FORWARD TILT Sun built its name on hardware. But Java's popularity is rising,
and Netscape adds to Sun's software arsenal. McNealy's assembly-line management
skills may not translate to the world of code. Alan Baratz, a top software exec,
left to become a venture capitalist. Will Sun's geeks stay with the program?
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