I’ve been watching our internal leadership conference and spending quite a bit of time talking in the virtual hallways, and I’ve been surprised at the intensity of feeling about Mr. McNealy. Yes, there are those here saying “About bloody time, now we can make some progress” but there’s a much bigger group that is genuinely emotional about this transition. Maybe it’s a function of seniority: I never met nor corresponded with Scott, and he hasn’t been much of a presence in the company’s conversation in the time I’ve been here. But there are a lot of smart, seasoned, unsentimental people making it clear that he’s been a major force in their lives, at a more personal level than I’m used to hearing when people speak about executives. I guess also that to a lot of people, Sun’s vision, for which Scott gets some of the credit, was a radical and wonderful thing. I first used Unix in 1979 and quit a nice big-company job to become a VAX-bsd sysadmin in 1983, so I’ve always kind of lived inside that vision. But I’ll tell you one thing, what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days makes me really regret that I didn’t get to know Scott.
