Speaking at Sun's annual partner summit in San Diego Friday, McNealy predicted that the Internet will become "the biggest stock market we've ever seen" and said Sun is working hard to take advantage of it.
The company is already running experimental auctions at eBay and Mercata and has auctioned some purchasing orders to suppliers, which McNealy claims has saved Sun millions of dollars because it can generate demand curves and more accurately forecast sales. He also touted iPlanet's announcement this week of a Marketmaker platform that will enable private auctions. Marketmaker is due in the third quarter.
"This stops the game of 'Liar, Liar,'" he said. "There is zero chance that my sales rep is going to walk away from a deal at exactly the right moment. Either the person has left a ton of money on the table or [he or she] wasn't lying but the customer has gone to HP. As a CEO, either way I'm getting a bad answer."
Hewlett-Packard gets a roasting
To the delight of his audience McNealy made his usual jabs at Sun's competition, which he called "pathetic."
Although he commented in turn on IBM, SGI, Compaq, Intel and Microsoft, he saved his most pointed jabs for Hewlett-Packard, noting that HP was spinning off its good businesses and hanging on to its bad ones.
EBay's announcement Tuesday that it is sticking with Sun's hardware despite previous problems with downtime was deliberately timed to coincide with HP's earnings announcement, McNealy said.
Sun President Ed Zander and other Sun executives confirmed McNealy's tale, saying Sun had taped a CNBC interview with HP CEO Carly Fiorina a few weeks ago in which Fiorina bragged that HP had taken the eBay deal away from Sun.
Sun is preparing for the roll-out of its UltraSparc III-based machines, which will be capable of 8-way clustering with 1,000 processors, McNealy said. Sun partners expect workstations to ship in July.
UltraSparc III has taped out and is yielding higher speeds than Sun anticipated -- 900MHz to in one case over 1GHz -- forcing Sun to redesign the boards to accommodate the speeds, McNealy said. Sun competitors have trumpeted UltraSparc III's delay, although Zander told Sun partners on Thursday that Sun anticipates being a US$15 billion company by the end of its fiscal year on June 30.
McNealy promised an integrated hardware/software stack that would function like a "Big Freaking Web Tone Switch" with "mailtone, calendartone, directory, firewall and security, single sign-on, Web access, wireless, app server tone, and commerce for buy, build and sell auctions." He said mail was "not an industry but a feature," and noted that "the LookOut -- I mean the OutLook virus -- is not a virus but a feature of Microsoft."
Sun will build Java browsers into every possible appliance, and McNealy promised a Java deal with a big game manufacturer. "We haven't done well in the game industry, but stay tuned," he said. "We hate Microsoft -- we're like the Microsoft busters -- and when you hate Microsoft, who are you going to call? We're getting a lot of attention from the game manufacturers, and there will be a very powerful appliance with a Java browser that speaks IP."
McNealy also made his usual promises to support Sun's partners and not compete with them like Intel does. "They're coming after your business. They're tired of chips and going after the service provider business, so think about that the next time you install Intel machines," he said.
