Brennan’s Blog

There is a rumor going around that Sun is looking to acquire Novell, which owns Suse Linux but also Ximian, the company behind Mono. What I would hope they do if this goes through is a restructuring of the leadership. After years of observing Novell and Sun decline in industry stature I feel they need better leadership which can be respected in our modern world of Open Source and internet technologies. I have one choice to start...

For CTO I would choose Migel de Icaza. He made his name by building the Gnome project, a popular and now very widespread X11 windowing manager and desktop framework. More recently he has jumped in head first to implement an Open Source version of the .NET runtime. That has been released and has been gaining steam for quite a while. I believe people are impressed with his abilities to both write code as as well as to organize and lead other developers. The alternatives are McNealy, Gosling and others who do not seem to see beyond their own egos to understand what people really want. They are out of touch.

To me it feels like Sun is filled with highly skilled senior level developers who have produced many powerful technologies and specifications in the past, but they do not realize they are not making money inventing technologies unless they actually produce products people are eager to buy. When was the last time you saw Sun or Novell prodcts as superior to their competitors? Sure they have implemented some powerful technologies and standards, but what products have succeeded in the market? Have they been able to leverage their past success or existing presence with current customers? Their efforts seem to fall short.

I think Sun would benefit from some young blood and a new point of view. They need a hip image to go with their pile of cool technologies so people seem them as viable again.

Beyond Mique de Icaza there are likely to be other qualified Open Source super stars. But who? What kind of person could take the healm and increase the reach that Sun and Novell have in the IT industry once again? What would they need to do to turn this big ship around?