Speaking at a Sun conference in Washington DC -- his first major public appearance since last week's reshuffle, which saw president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz take over the CEO role -- McNealy said that he would continue to be the visible face for Sun in many respects.
"I will have more time to do what is important, which is to get the message out. The hardest part of the [CEO] job was getting back jet-lagged, and having to lead the staff meetings. Jonathan's going to be spend the next 90 days doing the 2005 fiscal plan and the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance stuff, and I'm going to spend the next 90 days on planes," he said.
McNealy clearly expects Schwartz to emulate him in the CEO role.
Asked to comment on Sun's storage market share, he said: "I didn't speculate when I was CEO; hopefully [Schwartz is] well trained and won't speculate either."
During his keynote presentation, McNealy said that Sun's shift to offering Solaris for free and making money from services -- a model similar to that pursued by Red Hat in the Linux market -- was actually a logical step backwards for the company.
"We were the Red Hat of Berkeley Unix back in 1982," he said.
That position was echoed by executive vice president and chief marketing officer Anil Gadre, who said Sun's move to an open source model had begun to be profitable.
"We're starting to monetise that by way of support contracts. The Solaris unit is starting to look more like a Red Hat," Gadre said during a press conference prior to the event.
Since its launch as an open source product in June 2005, more than five million copies of Solaris have been downloaded, he said.
Assisting that process had been an unexpected move by Oracle to promote Solaris as a key platform for its own database and application offerings.
"Between November 2005 and January 2006, Oracle moved away from Linux to Solaris as a preferred base," Gadre said. "We nearly fell out of our own chairs on that one."
Angus Kidman travelled to Washington as a guest of Sun Microsystems.
