SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Would there be iPhones,
iPads and iPods on the market today if Sun Microsystems had been able
to close a deal to buy out Apple in the mid-1990s?
No, says former Sun CEO Scott McNealy. “If we
had bought Apple, there wouldn’t have been iPods or iPads … I’d have
screwed that up,” McNealy conceded in a talk Feb. 24 with another
former Sun top executive, ex-President Ed Zander, at a Churchill Club dinner at the Santa
Clara Convention Center.
McNealy (pictured) and Zander, headline speakers at
the event, talked about their years at Sun when that company was one of
the world’s top producers of servers, workstations, data
storage systems and Unix data center software. It also had a healthy
enterprise processor business with its Sparc architecture.
A Wall Street darling in the 1980s and ’90s, Sun fell on hard times in the 2000s and
ultimately was bought by Oracle in January 2010 for $7.4 billion.
But there was a time when Sun, at its
wealthiest, was poised to buy Apple when it was at the lowest point in
its storied history.
For more, read the eWeek article: How Apple Dodged a Sun Buyout: Former Execs McNealy, Zander Tell All.