High Noon

"It's rare to be able to catch three waves in a row."

"'Scott doesn't know anything about computers, but he's a real good operations guy,' Raduchel confided to Broyles. 'He's going to make someone a lot of money someday.'"

"It was a classic example of the win-at-all-costs West Coast approach versus the more polished, mannerly East Coast mentality."

"He has an incredible ability to motivate people to basically kill themselves because they're on a mission. He convinces you that you need to work 80 hours a week."

"Sun was founded and built on the belief in supporting an open system?that is, using technology readily available to others. "

"Do what you have to do to attract the customers and lock in market share; then worry about profitability."

"By developing SPARC, Solaris, and Java, Sun was able to move to a more advantageous position in which it licensed valuable intellectual property to others while commanding higher prices for its own products."

"The Sun culture is for neither the thin-skinned nor the anal-retentive soul who prefers a carefully ordered existence."

"Even as Sun was putting its internal resources behind Java and getting ready to release the first publicly available version of the language, Java remained an unknown quantity both inside and outside the company."

"Even while the Java alliance was coalescing, it was evident that demand for Java technology was building so rapidly that Sun couldn't keep up with it."

"Sun was so keen on presenting itself as the undefiled alternative to Microsoft that it ignored the fact that its customers had to live in both worlds."

"What it comes down to is that Microsoft wants the benefit of Java as a programming language, but refuses to recognize Java as anything beyond that."

"When you buy from Sun, you get Sun, and Sun only. In the corporate computing world, this is a lonely?but so far, defensible?stance. "

"Sun stands almost alone now in sticking with the strategy of "innovate, and they will come.""