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• eweek article on Mr. McNealy
• The Register article on Mr. McNealy
• Global Education & Learning Community
• Mr. McNealy's bio

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Tavis: Scott McNealy is the chairman and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, one of the leading suppliers of computer networking and infrastructure in the world. He recently stepped down from his post as CEO of the company to focus his energy on education. In January, he created a nonprofit organization called the Global Education and Learning Community, which hopes to shed light on the more than 100 million kids around the world without access to primary education. Scott McNealy, glad to have you on the program.

Scott McNealy: Great to be here, Tavis.

Tavis: Thank you, and first of all, it's my first time meeting you, so congratulations on all the Sun Microsystems success. I'm a little late, but (laugh) better late than never, I guess.

McNealy: It's been a fun 24 years.

Tavis: Yeah, take me back right quick, before I get to the education, and I definitely wanna talk about that. Take me back 24 years, and tell me how this thing got off the ground. That we all now know.

McNealy: Well, it started off as a little project by a German engineer, Andreas Von Bechtolsheim, at Stanford University. He wanted to do computing, and he had to share many computers, so he decided to build his own little workstation. And he called it the Stanford University Network, and SUN workstation. And a couple of Stanford business school students, including myself, got together with him and a guy from Berkeley who did the software for network computing. And we started Sun Microsystems. It was either that or Bun Microsystems, with Berkeley University. (Laugh) So we decided the logo would look better with Sun Microsystems, so.

Tavis: Yeah. Wise choice, you thinker, you. Your role in this has been fascinating, because you are not a programmer; you weren't really a computer geek, in that sense. But you brought, I guess, the kind of business savvy to the project.

McNealy: Well, I'm not sure I brought savvy. We were all 27, all four of us, and I had three years' business experience, which was more than the other three founders, combined. So compared to them, I was savvy, but I think the real advantage I brought, as opposed to focusing in on the product, the colors, and the engineering and all the rest of it, I focused on making sure the team worked well, and I think that was the value that I brought.

Tavis: So the mantra is cool, the network is the computer. But beyond the logo, beyond the brand, beyond the sloganeering, what's your sense of what you think the legacy is, at this point, of Sun Microsystems? What have you guys brought to this silicon game?

McNealy: So there's two major things. First of all, the current computing strategy that people think about is I gotta go out and buy my own computer. Which is kind of like going out and buying your own telephone switch or your own infrastructure. You shouldn't have to do that. You should have access. You don't buy a television station; you buy an access device to the network. And you buy an access device to the telephone network, which is called a cell phone or a phone.

And we wanna turn computing into a more thin, simple, less user-administrative kind of environment. Google, and the Google Desktop, is a classic example. All you need is a browser, and you get access to all of these things. So, one is we're trying to move computing back into the network, so you don't have to deal with it. Second thing we've done is we've opened up the interfaces to allow people to share and, and interoperate. Because there's been so many incompatible computing environments. By opening our interfaces and sharing, we've created a much more interoperable world, with lower barriers to exit.

Tavis: You don't make a company as successful as Sun Microsystems without having to sometimes wrestle with other folk, and you have developed over the years as CEO a reputation for being aggressive, for not backing down, for...

McNealy: Moi?

Tavis: Yeah, you. (Laugh) Where you've been suing when you have to. You know a guy is serious and unafraid when you sue Microsoft not once, but a couple of times, in fact. Tell me where that kind of leadership style developed for you, and whether or not you think you have to be that way in a game that is as cutthroat and as competitive as technology is today?

McNealy: I don't know where that comes from. Jack Welsh, I was on his board for a while at GE, and he made a comment that I agree with. You don't really develop leaders. You can only identify them, and give them more experience. And some folks are just born to - our motto when we started Sun is if we're gonna dive into the pool, if we do a belly flop, we wanna empty the pool out.

We don't wanna try and slip in the water quietly. We wanna go in and be aggressive. And just go big, go large, and go strong. What the heck? It's not a rehearsal here; it's your one chance to go do it. So we've always taken on the big swings. And my view is the bigger the market, the bigger the opportunity. So.

Tavis: So one has to assume, then, that for a guy whose run this thing for as long as you've helped run it, when he steps aside, that means that something has changed beyond the obvious, that there's somebody else sitting in that CEO chair, what happens to Sun Microsystems now that you've assumed a different kind of role?

McNealy: Well, I'm still working full time.

Tavis: Still the chairman, yeah.

McNealy: I'm chairman of the board; I'm chairman of our Sun Federal operation, focusing on that. I'm focused on our Japanese relationships. And I'm selling to our top 50 customers. And I'm doing what I want to do. I didn't wanna do the CEO job. It's a hard job. It's a difficult job. It's, and I've got four young boys at home. And when I get home, I like to be able to go spend time with them, rather than sitting in a staff meeting.

I was in the CEO piñata for 22-plus years. It's a long time for anybody to be getting whacked by random (laugh), blind two-by-fours. And so, it's kind of nice that I let the young kids go off and do that again, and I got a chance to step down from CEO on my own terms and timing at the age of 51. And I'm still pretty healthy and excited, and I can still help the company enormously, and probably more valuable to the company and the job I'm in. So I got the best job in the world right now, from that perspective.

Tavis: In my own mind, at least, I'm thinking that I understand why you still do this, but I wanna hear it from you, 'cause it may be different than what I'm thinking. That is to say, why it is that you, at this point, still sell? Even though you mentioned you (unintelligible) the top 50 customers, why are you still in the selling business?

McNealy: Business is selling. If you wanna buy something, you gotta sell them to give you the best price.

Tavis: You're a chairman. You ain't gotta go sell stuff.

McNealy: Oh, man, business is all about selling. If you wanna hire somebody, you gotta sell them this is the best opportunity they could possibly find. If you wanna go sell a product, you gotta go out and sell it. And, and to me, that's what commerce is all about. Selling, and selling an establishing, a level of credibility and trust and reliability and consistency that stands the test of time.

'Cause you know what? With the Internet now, with blogs and even eBay has a referral system that tells whether somebody's a reliable seller or buyer. And you can't hide. And you could get away with it in the old days. You can't fool many people for very long with the Internet today.

Tavis: Let me put you on the spot and ask you, you can share one, two, or three, whatever. Doesn't matter to me; I'm just curious. I'm gonna get inside your head here. Over these years of selling, and selling to top customers, and doing it obviously successfully, for all of those persons who are watching who are in the sales game, there are many watching, I suspect, who do this, what have you learned about selling, and selling successfully?

McNealy: Selling's easy. You just can't get disappointed by 'no.' 'No' is the most important answer you'll get. So I'll say, 'Will you buy my product?' You say, 'No.' You come back with, 'Why?' They explain it, 'Here's why I won't buy your product.' You go fix it, come back and say, 'Now will you buy my product?' 'No.' So then you say, 'Why?' And then you go back. And you just keep looking for the 'no's.'

'Cause eventually, you'll solve all of the no problems, and then they'll say, 'If I give you the order, will you go away?' (Laugh) And you can get the order that way. But too many people think 'no' is the answer. 'No' is a clue.

Tavis: I like that. I'll take that, I'll take that. The education project you're working on now. If you're gonna step aside from being CEO and focus your energies on anything else, there can't be, in my mind, at least, a more noble venture than taking on trying to educate kids. So tell me about your work now.

McNealy: Well, I'm very excited about No Child Left Behind, but I'm also worried about the parents, teachers, and the children who are being held back. And I look at (unintelligible) young kids; I noticed we're spending $130 on a third-grade math textbook, even though it hasn't changed since Newton got hit on the head with an apple. And every four years, they gratuitously revise the book, force you to buy new ones, all the rest of it.

And there's not self-paced, online, and certified content. Another thing we learned at Sun is that we use communities to build browsers in open source, open interface, community-developed operating systems and spreadsheets and word processors. Why don't we all get together as an online community like Wikipedia, and build a curriculum online that's a free, open source, internationalized, available to any and everybody, to go at their own pace?

I took one class at Harvard, self-paced. It was statistics. I started Monday morning, I was done Tuesday night. I hadn't slept, eaten, or showered. I aced it. And if I could have taken Harvard undergrad online, I think I could have finished it in about 12 weeks. And I would have. 'Cause I might have starved myself to death, but I wanted to go as fast as I could. And the system slowed me down.

And the idea of putting all of this content, for free, it's called GELC.org, or the Global Education and Learning Community, we're building a community. And we've got the Ministry Of China, and we've got the Alberta School District, we've got the MIT curriculum. We've got all these folks coming together. We've got about 500 projects, and thousands of people now putting together this content.

In fact, we had a kid from Kuwait take a couple of introductory physics courses in about 18 days, and finish them. And what an opportunity for people to just go as hard and as fast as - in other words, let's not let the system and the lowest common denominator. So the kids who are gonna solve bird flu are gonna be the ones who we're probably holding back.

Tavis: The viewers I've heard me say this, I'm sure, more than once over years of hosting this show, which is to quote my grandmother, who said it's a great idea, but it's too much like right. It's too much like right.

McNealy: I worry about that. (Laugh) I worry about that.

Tavis: So you understand my grandmother, yeah.

McNealy: In California, we spend $400 million a year on textbooks. And you know what? We don't even know if they're good. And is it the PTA choosing, or a good sales rep who convinces the school district to buy them? Imagine we had chapter four on this third grade math curriculum, and somebody says, 'I got a better chapter four for you.' Can you imagine giving half of the students online chapter four control, and half chapter four new?

And then in weeks, we'll know who scores better on the test. And we'll have statistical science and justification for whether we have - we can evolve the curriculum in a scientific way, as opposed to a random way. There's a lot of advantages to doing this online.

Tavis: As I mentioned, I see the nobility in it. Tell me how you came to this, though, of all the things that you could do. What attracted you to this particular challenge?

McNealy: I'll be a little Al Gore-ish, and say that Sun Microsystems kind of invented open source and community development. Our company got started out of Berkeley, where Bill Joy, one of our founders, had invented the open source operating system called Berkeley Unix. And we kind of grabbed that. We did that with our networking code, and we kind of invented, and we've donated more code and patents to the planet, open.

We just made it available to anybody else. And I thought, why are we making browsers open source and free? Why don't we make the most important thing, educational materials for our kids? Think about the billions of, China, India, Africa, they can't afford $130 for a third grade math textbook. No way. Let's make it free. And let's get the best. I'll give you an example here in Hollywood.

Eighty, ninety years ago, there were 40,000 piano players playing piano in front of the movies in the silent movie era. Then we learned how to put music on the film, and now the two best piano players are in Hollywood, and everybody gets to share in their great music. And why can't we do that with educational materials?

Tavis: Well, I'm sure if Scott McNealy is behind it, it's gonna go somewhere, and particularly given the success he's had over the last 25 years or so at Sun Microsystems. It's an honor to meet you.

McNealy: Thank you, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program, and all the best with the project.

McNealy: Glad to be here. Thank you.

Tavis: We'll talk to you down the road; see how it's progressing, if you'll come back.

McNealy: I'd love to do that.

Tavis: Glad to have you back. Up next on this program, Oscar-nominated actress Diane Lane. Stay with us.