Meeting Scott McNealy

Scott McNealy graced Singapore with his presence on invitation of IDA. He was all the rave about building communities. In a hit to Microsoft he stated: "If you give the 75% of the not connected people a Wintel box that consumes 250 watts a pop you will have global warming at it's best".
His key message for Java's tenth anniversary was: Compatibility, Community, Volume and Value.
Through all his presentation he was poking fun on Microsoft creating laughter in the audience.
SUN started GELC as a global education initiative to bridge the digital divide, interesting concept. Microsoft was not the only one to be poked fun on by Scott, IBM and OpenSource got their share too. He blamed IBM to make IT so complicated, so professional service can generate revenue and OpenSource to be freewheeling lucky go easy unreliable stuff. He advocated to step back and review if it does make sense to have customized IT infrastructure. His point is, that standardized components would be more efficient. He reminded, that cost is not only acquisition cost and operational cost, but also exit cost. Only open standards will keep exit costs low. Then he drifted away and dreamt of Solaris surviving and overtaking all other Unix versions a well as Linux. Scott stated SUN has one million subscribers for their enterprise system. Sounds a bit thin compared to half a billion eMail seats worldwide. And he was dreaming on envisioning: slim clients (a.k.a. smart terminals) would replace PCs since the data centre would provide the horsepower needed.
Here he has a point: power consumption becomes a huge problem and energy efficiency will be key. Scott used the opportunity to bash Dell claiming the new SUN Opteron servers are 60% more efficient, 75% smaller and half the price of a comparable Dell system.
Scott called all this opportunities "iPod moments".
I am curious how all that will work out for SUN.

P.S: This Blog entry is created life during his speech.