01.17.09
Press Says Sun Microsystems Used to be Called Novell
Nitpicking is easy when comments are open to everyone, but the ‘mainstream’ media rarely leaves any room for feedback from readers, even when it claims that Sun is Novell and Lotus Notes is open source*.
Consequently, Eric Schmidt arrived that year. He was a Ph. D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and had significant industry experience as an executive at Sun Microsystems, which at that time was called Novell.
This is why, as we’ve stressed before, "Journalism is Junk". Errors do occur on occasions even if they are never corrected or pointed out in public. Speaking of Eric Schmidt, the Bartz appointment in Yahoo! has gotten some coverage in the New York Times, which uses Schmidt to make its point by citing his history at Novell.
I’m not saying that the companies need to hire chief executives from their own industries. Before running Google, Eric Schmidt was an engineer and ran Novell, a network software company that has nothing to do with advertising or consumer Internet services. And the man I’d say has been the very best Internet company executive, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, was a 30-year-old midlevel executive at a hedge fund before founding his company.
As a side note, the Microsoft drone [1, 2] known as Maureen O’Gara has gone on some kind of nasty attack on Bartz, calling her a “bitch” in a new Sys-Con article. How low has so-called journalism sunk? █
“As discussed in our PR meeting this morning. David & I have spoken with Maureen O’Gara (based on go ahead from BrianV) and planted the story. She has agreed to not attribute the story to us….
“[...] Inform Maureen O’ Gara (Senior Editor Client Server News/LinuxGram) or John Markoff (NYT) of announcement on Aug 28, 2000. Owner dougmil (Approval received from BrianV to proceed)
“Contact Eric Raymond, Tim O’Reilly or Bruce Perrins to solicit support for this going against the objectives of the Open Source movement. Owner: dougmil [Doug Miller]. Note that I will not be doing this. Maureen O’Gara said she was going to call them so it looks better coming from her.”
(From Microsoft’s smoking guns)
____
* I corrected the author, but it was too late for him to correct a widely-spread article that disseminated misconceptions.
