"In August 1997 McNealy famously declared to the San Jose
Mercury: "We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our
network. And I thought, 'What a huge waste of corporate
productivity'. So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable
record-breaking fiscal quarters since. Now I would argue that every
company in the world, if it would just ban PowerPoint, would see
its earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going: 'What
do I do? Guess I've got to go to work'."
"An office productivity suite was not the most obvious purchase
for Sun Microsystems, and many commentators assumed that the
acquisition of StarDivision was a stab at Microsoft and an attempt
to undermine Office, Microsoft's primary source of revenue. A more
generous interpretation assumes that Sun's sponsorship of Java, the
GNOME desktop, the Mozilla Foundation, and OpenOffice.org is part
of a longer term strategy to push UNIX and Linux based thin clients
into the data centre, manifesting Sun's long held mantra that "The
Network is the Computer.""
