Scott McNealy resigns CEO post at Sun to Jonathan Schwartz

Santa Clara (CA) - In the culmination of at least the first third of what financial analysts predicted last month, Sun Microsystems’ president and COO Jonathan Schwartz was handed the reigns of the chief executive officer’s post today, by chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy. Schwartz will surrender only the COO title, becoming President / CEO in an era when holding both titles is otherwise becoming passé.

A ten-year veteran of Sun, Schwartz has become a more highly visible member of the executive branch, and a very vocal advocate of Linux. In a 2003 roundtable discussion at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, Schwartz called operating systems "the single most valuable asset on the Internet, period," describing them as the principal vehicle for the distribution of content in a networked world. He’s an advocate not only of the "network is the computer" axiom at Sun, which McNealy helped champion, but also of the idea of the "Sun Grid," a system of Web services whose revenue model is based on the public utility system, for a kind of "pay-per-use" model. The first services on the Sun Grid officially premiered just a few weeks ago.

In a blog posting last month, Schwartz compared himself to one of the great names in industrial history, in describing his own efforts to pitch the Sun Grid concept. "Frankly, it’s been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future," he wrote. "Just as I’m sure George Westinghouse was confounded by the Chief Electricity Officers of the time that resisted buying power from a grid, rather than building their own internal utilities. But that’s not to suggest it hasn’t been happening in the business world."

In a statement today, McNealy said he will continue to work with the company in devising strategy, as well as participating in an expanded effort to represent Sun among customers in the government sector.

Rumors of McNealy’s plans to exit the CEO post were made public in a financial analyst’s statement last March, the content of which was subsequently misinterpreted by a blogger. The result was a now-infamous headline, "McNealy Resigns ; Will Google Buy Sun Microsystems ?" The post generated numerous threads that speculated in turn on the effect of Eric Schmidt holding the CEO posts at both Google and Sun - an event whose likelihood has clearly cast into the bit bucket of history.