do it. think it. blog it! ... a twisted world

In McNealy's opinion, much of Sun's problem is merely perception compounded by flawed Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that draw attention away from the company's track record of cash generation. We have one of the two, maybe three operating systems that are going to survive: Windows, Solaris and maybe Red Hat.

I'll start with the vision. We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. We build that infrastructure piece. We have a mission, and that's make money and grow. That allows us to realize our cause, and that is to eliminate the digital divide. We believe our strategy, way more than a PC on everybody's desk or a mainframe everywhere, is the way to make that happen. We have a strategy that's very different from everybody else's, and it's community development. The way we say that is with the S curve in all our new literature. It's not for Scott, it's not for Sun, it's for "share." We're grabbing that word and saying, of anybody, we own the word "share." We own that space. [.........] We are now at 2.5 billion Java devices on the planet--(including) 700 million cell phones, 700 million PCs. We had 17 million and 20 million downloads in the last couple months of the J2SE environment. That is a stunning number. [.........] Last quarter, we lost $3 million dollars. We are nine months into this fiscal year. Year-over-year, on an operating margin basis, we have improved for the first nine months, year-over-year, $550 million. If you believe what the analysts say, it's going to be between a $700 million and $800 million improvement year-over-year in operating margins, pretax, pre-GAAP, pre-one-time any of that stuff. That, on an $11 billion or so revenue run rate, is stunning. If I do that again next year, move over Jack Welch in the hall of fame.