McNealy Resignation Rumors Prove True

The Market

from the time-on-his-hands dept

Last week, I wrote about how The Wall Street Journal and others took the Scott McNealy resignation rumors legit, but didn’t back the story up any more than the people in the game of telephone several weeks earlier. Turns out the WSJ did have one thing on its side — timing. McNealy announced today that he was stepping aside after 22 years in charge of Sun Microsystems, confirming what one analyst had predicted and handing a moral victory to contrarians everywhere. McNealy is staying full-time at Sun as chairman, while president and COO Jonathan Schwartz will take over as CEO. As many are pointing out, McNealy is one of the last holdouts of an early era in Silicon Valley, where companies were led by their “swashbuckling founders”, as the AP put it, so perhaps Schwartz’ ascendance to the throne signals the era of the blogger as CEO, given his popular blog. Of course, it probably won’t be too long before Sun’s lawyers shut that down. Though maybe now McNealy can start blogging. He’d probably be more entertaining anyway.