“An astonishing thing has happened at Sun Microsystems. A
company built on high margins from hardware sales is now turning
upside down and going soft. The face of this transformation is the
freshly minted CEO and former McKinsey consultant Jonathan
Schwartz. Originally a numbers guy turned software evangelist,
Schwartz is almost certainly committing Sun to a future with a
business model centered on software–open source software.“But the challenges are many. Sun historically has been a
hardware company. Indeed, former Sun CEO (and current chairman)
Scott McNealy is famous for once stating that software would
someday be free. Little did he know that his successor would have
to build a business model on that prediction…”