Customer Reviews

High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I found this book interesting, and for the most part factual, or at least consistant with my knowledge of the industry and Sun's history. I was hoping to get more biographical infomation on Scott McNealy. I felt mislead by the cover as the book doesn't really give any "inside story" of Scott McNealy. While the book does tell an interesting story on "the rise of Sun Microsystems", I think the book comes across as biased against Sun in regards to its struggles against the competition. The industry changes quickly and prehaps things have changed since this book was written. It appeared to me that the author was implying that Sun was standing still with Solaris and trying to buy time until NT overtook Solaris. It is my professional opinion that Sun is improving the Solaris operating system and the Ultra Sparc hardware at a faster rate than Microsoft is getting NT ready for prime time. I don't see Sun facing much competition from Compaq or Dell, even when and if the Merced chip arrives. The author states in the final pages of the book that Sun needs to focus on beating IBM. I have worked in a large IBM Mainframe shop for 15 years. What I see is more and more work being offloaded from the IBM mainframes to the Sun/Solaris servers. I think IBM will beat itself as far as competing with Sun goes. Their mainframes running MVS are too expensive to purchase, too expensive to operate and don't offer the variety of database and ERP software that can be found on Unix. If IBM had a decent offering in the Unix world, they wouldn't have just gone out and accuired Sequent Computer Corp.I think it is IBM who must play catch up in order to be a major player in the internet world. I think the author could have painted a more objective and less subjective view of Sun's chances for survival in the industry. All, in all, I would still recommend the book. I found it interesting, just a bit too biased toward Microsoft and IBM.

For an editor of Upside and Forbes, the writing in this book is surpisingly amateurish and predictable. It jumps around a lot and doesn't really deliver anything insightful or interesting, and so I found it not worthwhile.

This is more of a business biography about the company and its present CEO. The age old feud against Microsoft and SUN's active role to bring the big brother to book have been narrated like a novel. Technology takes the back seat when dramatics take over. The concepts of "Network is the computer", Java, "Openness" and the paradigm shift in the world of computing that has taken place during the last two decades, the major players and the not so ethical ways of competing do get some attention.

The dot in the dot com deserves a much better book that can bring out its real strengths and contribution to the world of cyberspace.The SUN never sets over this small planet !

The author captures well the essence of Sun's roots, the company's several mid-life crises, and its recent resurgence on the strength of its high-end server offerings and the awesome potential of the still-nascent Java. As well, the spirit of the defining character of this tale, Scott McNealy, is vividly illustrated time and again. The dictionary definition of "visionary" should have a picture of McNealy and a Sun logo attached. Sun's rise makes an inspiring story, but in this reader's opinion, the best is yet to come. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

If you were on a desert island from 1982 to 1999, this book might have extra value to you. Otherwise, you may already know a great deal about what's covered in this book.

"High Noon" is quite readable but doesn't dig very deep. It provides a good, albeit Pollyanna-ish introduction to Sun's history and to McNealy...up until 1999. Did I learn anything? Yes, for example, I hadn't known that Gosling architected NeWS. But the level of this book isn't that much deeper than a Reader's Digest article.

If you don't know much about Sun's pre-2000 past and want a quick survey, "High Noon" may help you.

You could feel the fast pace of Sun in Southwick's writing. The story followed a sensible chronology, was well-written as far as layman terms and yet enjoyable for the techies, too. The good points and needs-improvements of both Sun and Scott McNealy were well presented.

Unlike most books of the high-tech, hero-worship genre, these authors actually did their homework and then wrote an intelligent, well organized history of Sun Microsystems and Scott McNealy. Given the multiple transformations that Sun has gone through (workstations, chip design, software design, servers, memory systems, enterprise hardware and software, and Java), as well as its famous feud with Microsoft and Mister Bill, that is no easy task, but they provide a succinct (225 page) and unbiased view that will be of interest to anyone who is interested in learning more about these subjects. The endnotes are particularly helpful.

Although the authors were not able to interview McNealy (he turned down their request), they do include intelligent observations about him and Sun from knowledgeable persons both within and outside Sun. Given the shallowness of McNealy's public comments and statements in other interviews to date (one suspects that he is finally learning to put a governor on his mouth), the omission is not noticeable.

It is rumored that Ms. Southwick is in the process of preparing a similar volume about Oracle and Larry Ellison. If so, it will be a welcome improvement over the swill (e.g., "The Oracle of Oracle" by Florence Stone) that has been published about them to date.

Well, here I am, after reading the book for about two weeks every morning, and I am left with no deep impressions about either Sun or Scott.
The book appears to be a collection of newspaper articles. My first impression from the title of the book was that it talks a lot about Scott McNealy, which the author clearly failed to achieve. I guess the author could have rather written two books - a biography on Scott and business history of Sun. The book fails to achieve either of these satisfactorily.
I was hoping to know a lot about Java and Solaris, and although there were three chapters dedicated to Java, they didnt leave a lasting impression on me. The author seems to be unaware of other battles going around which would give Java a tough time to evolve.
Finally, the book doesnt really form a story. Its more like every chapter can be read almost independent of each other.

A fascinating, inside look at the making of Sun Microsystems and its founder Scott McNealy. Includes insightful and entertaining interviews from many of the key high-tech players in Silicon Valley. This book is a great read; I really enjoyed it.

One of the most boring books I have ever read. I love Sun Micro, but this seemed to much of a promotional book for Wall Street analaysts than anything. Its a timeline of events, and a very boring one at that. I could not wait to finish it.