RE: McNealy on Powerpoint...

Joe Barrera (joebar@microsoft.com)
Sun, 2 Feb 1997 16:43:32 -0800


Scott McNealy: the Howard Cosell of the computer world. There are lots of
half-assed quotes out there. But the truly embarrassing, zero-assed ones
always seem to come from Scott.

There are so many possible responses to his quote. Here are just a few.

1. Great, Scott, maybe if you banned telephones, the written word, and all
other forms of inter-employee communication, you'd be even more
profitable.
2. I guess that would explain Microsoft's recent disastrous fiscal
quarters. Er, no, wait...
3. I guess Scott has never heard of the concept of "control" in
experimental design. Let's just be glad that he didn't decide three
quarters ago that child sacrifice was the key to fiscal success...

- Joe

Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/barc/joebar
Phone, Redmond: (206) 936-3837; San Francisco: (415) 778-8227
Pager (100 char max.): 1338993@roam.pagemart.net or (800) 864-8444

-----Original Message-----
From: adam@cs.caltech.edu [SMTP:adam@cs.caltech.edu]
Sent: Sunday, February 02, 1997 3:43 PM
To: FoRK@xent.w3.org
Subject: McNealy on Powerpoint...

In an interview at http://www.sjmercury.com/business/sun0126.htm
Scott McNealy of Sun explains corporate policy regarding PowerPoint:

> We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network.
> And I thought, ``What a huge waste of corporate productivity.''
> So we banned it. And we've had three unbelievable record-breaking
> fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that
> every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would
> see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going,
> ``What do I do? Guess I've got to go to work.''