Word: sun
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bright glow is rising above Silicon Valley's gloomy horizon. In a computer industry plagued by layoffs and flat revenues, Sun Microsystems of Mountain View, Calif., has achieved phenomenal growth. Founded only four years ago, Sun boosted sales from $8 million in fiscal 1983 to $115 million in 1985. Over the same period, annual profits surged from $654,000 to $8.5 million. Run by Scott McNealy, 31, Andreas Bechtolsheim, 30, and William Joy, 31, a trio of workaholic wunderkinder, the company shows signs of staying power in a business in which success is often fleeting...
...Sun's specialty is workstations, high-powered desktop computers that perform as well as much larger and more expensive minicomputers. Favored by scientists and engineers, workstations can manipulate graphics and data many times as fast as standard personal computers. In its short life, Sun has captured 20% of workstation sales in the U.S., and is rapidly gaining on Chelmsford, Mass.- based Apollo, which first developed that kind of computer and still holds 39% of the market. The stakes in the competition are enormous: workstation sales are expected to surge from $735 million last year to $2.5 billion...
...Sun's popular workstations cost anywhere from $7,900 to $70,000, but the price is generally 10% to 20% less than that for comparable models offered by competitors. In addition, Sun users can exchange data with many other types of computers. That allows business customers who already have office computer systems to add Sun workstations. Says McNealy: "Customers can mix and match and create a customized computing environment...
...Sun got started in 1982 when Vinod Khosla, a Stanford Business School graduate, brought together McNealy, a former classmate, and Bechtolsheim, a Stanford engineering graduate student who had developed an impressive prototype for a workstation. McNealy recalls that Khosla persuaded him over a dinner of McDonald's Big Macs to quit his job as director of operations at Onyx Systems, a computer company, and help found a new firm. The next recruit was Joy, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering at Berkeley and a leading computer- software designer...
Though Khosla soon withdrew from day-to-day involvement in Sun's operations to realize his goal of retiring at age 30, the remaining trio found that they complemented one another well. Bechtolsheim, who became vice president of technology, was the wizard who designed Sun's early machines. McNealy, who has been chairman since 1984, is the bottom-line man who hires the employees and makes sure that the products are attractively priced. As vice president of research and development, Joy became the visionary of the group, charged with keeping an eye on the company's future...