‘High Noon’ depicts Sun’s rise to tech power

“The Network is the Computer.” If you’re familiar with Sun Microsystems, you know the phrase.

It has been Sun’s tagline for years, but it hasn’t always been well understood. Like lots of what comes out of the Silicon Valley firm, the phrase was ahead of its time.

Much of Sun, from its first workstations to its Solaris operating system and its Java software, was a technological leap forward. At least that’s according to Karen Southwick, author of “High Noon – The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems.”

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The book chronicles Sun’s rise from a start-up in 1982 through its years of exponential growth and internal turmoil in the mid and late ’80s. It also takes a look at the firm’s freewheeling, workaholic corporate culture and the very public profile of Sun’s co-founder and leader, Scott McNealy.

While many recognize McNealy as the most ardent basher of Microsoft and its chairman, Bill Gates, “High Noon” reveals the talents that allowed him to rise to the top of Sun and, in doing so, lead it to more than $10 billion in annual revenues in fewer than 20 years.

Southwick shows us how, from humble beginnings, McNealy and Sun’s other co-founders were able to beat competitors with technology that perhaps was not top of the line, but with a business strategy that “took no prisoners” in going after market share and killing competitors.

For a reader without a technical background, “High Noon” is easy to understand and broad in scope. It deals more with how Sun succeeded through its dedication to open standards and its risk-taking ways rather than the specifics of hardware or software.

The book also touches on Jini, a new software from Sun that purports to allow any digital device to hook into a computer network. The uses for it would seem endless.

One fault worth mentioning – Southwick pays little treatment to the tremendous opportunity Sun missed in networking. At one time, Cisco Systems was running its routers through Sun hardware. But Sun paid little attention to the potential of manufacturing and selling the “plumbing” behind networks.

Even company officials admit Sun “missed the boat” on networking, and Southwick devotes only a few pages to that lost opportunity. Some boat: Cisco’s growth has exceeded even that of Sun’s, and its market

capitalization is several times that of Sun.

And yet Sun is a remarkable success story. The company has lost money in only one quarter during its 17-year existence. Still, “High Noon” gives good treatment to the story of McNealy and Sun Microsystems. It’s an

enlightening account of Sun’s rocket ride to prominence and in some sectors, dominance, in the computer industry.