Who is Sun Microsystems?
• Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy • 34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues • Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters • Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger) • The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL • Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home • Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters) • Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees
