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

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

Karen Southwick. John Wiley & Sons, $49.95 (242pp) ISBN 978-0-471-29713-0

Many readers may still be unsure exactly what Sun Microsystems does, despite the company's recently ubiquitous ads (""We're the dot in .com"") obliquely touting the Java programming language. Southwick, the managing editor of Forbes's online daily edition, ASAP, doesn't spend much time explaining Sun's hardware manufacturing and software development. She concentrates, instead, on the company's rapid growth to a current valuation of about $10 billion. She sees Sun (an acronym for Stanford University Network) as a creation of CEO McNealy, who was tapped by two other Stanford-affiliated students, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolscheim, to help run the fledgling company in 1982. After the board ousted engineering visionary Khosla in 1984, McNealy got the nod, and never looked back. According to most accounts, including this one, he has piloted Sun with a mixture of brio, financial know-how and sensitivity. He has also become perhaps Bill Gates's most vocal antagonist. McNealy declined to be interviewed for the book, and Southwick was forced to rely on conversations with many current and former Sun employees. Though her report founders on too many business-talk sentences like ""With tremendous growth comes the equally tremendous challenge of accommodating that growth from a resource and management perspective,"" Southwick does give a solid, chronological account of the company and its momentous decision to transform itself from a hardware-only company into a creator and provider of software. $100,000 ad/promo; 75,000 first printing. (Sept.)