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Conversations From the Corner Office
BIO
Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy is founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Before he assumed the position of chairman in April 2006, McNealy was the company's CEO for 22 years.
In 1982, McNealy and three friends founded Sun Microsystems at Stanford University, all at the age of 27. The mission behind the venture was to bring super-fast workstation computers on the UNIX operating system to the masses. Sun grossed more than $500 million within the first five years.
With a reputation for being both risk-taker and visionary, McNealy was the driving force behind many of Sun's core products, including the operating system Solaris and the multicore processor SPARC. In 1996, McNealy began pushing the programming language Java — arguably the company's most important innovation to date — as the industry standard. In 1999, he famously predicted the freeware movement, years before the phenomenon took hold.
McNealy has described his management style as "unorthodox," a quality that also defines his personality. McNealy has said that he is both a "raging capitalist" and a "flaming social liberal." He's also known for his public dressing-downs against longtime rival Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Despite an instinct for all things IT, McNealy's entry into the field was accidental. After receiving a bachelor's degree in economics at Harvard, McNealy went on to earn an MBA at Stanford.
McNealy was born in 1954 and grew up in Detroit. His father was vice president of American Motors.
He is married with four children.
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