The face of Sun

Cnet recently interviewed Jonathan Schwartz about his first year on the job. He doesn't like the model of the cowboy CEO, he says, giving credit for Sun's successes to his predecessor, Sun's employees, leaders within the company -- anybody but himself. He doesn't want to be the public face of Sun, although he's happy to be the company's most outspoken communicator.

It's true that he's not a CEO from the mold of Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Scott McNealy. But it seems that some of the values that he projects -- humility, cooperation, openness -- are values that Sun is increasingly embracing. Surely it's not coincidental that Sun has one of the most open CEOs in modern business and that it is finally aggressively enbracing open source.

Yes, Jonathan is less essential to Sun than Steve Jobs is to Apple -- Apple is uniquely dependent on its superstar CEO. But I think one could argue that Sun is starting to look like Jonathan Schwartz just as Apple looks like Steve Jobs.

Or have I just been reading the ponytailed CEO's blog too much?

Posted by Mike Swaine at 03:57 PM  Permalink