McNealy's comments support a general opinion among analysts that the management change was calculated. Though some critics
have been calling for McNealy to step down for years, Forrester's Koetzle said this is probably the right time for him to
leave the company he founded nearly 25 years ago in 1982.
"This is McNealy's company," she said. "He didn't want to be the one to leave when the chips were down. He wanted to leave
his successor on a positive trajectory instead of, 'Here, I'm leaving you a mess to clean up'."
There have been signs of life at Sun lately, even before Monday's announcements. The stock price has been creeping up, and
rose by about 8 percent in after-hours trading Monday when Wall Street reacted positively to the executive changes.
Sun, too, has shown its strategic savvy in the last year, aligning itself with industry heavyweight Google Inc., said Joe
Wilcox, analyst with JupiterResearch. Though what will actually be delivered through the deal, which at this point is a vague
technology partnership around the Java runtime, is still up in the air, he said it bodes well for Sun's success in the future
to be paired with the industry and Wall Street darling.
"Sun still has the influence -- don't count them out yet," he said.
Known for being candid, intelligent and relentless when it comes to staying on message about Sun's strategy, Schwartz will
continue to push a plan to provide network infrastructure, including hardware, software and professional services, for Web-based
services that touch a range of devices, analysts said. The Google deal will likely play a pivotal role in that, they said.
True to character, Schwartz hit the ground running in his new position, already hinting at more changes to come at the company
in a conference call following his appointment. He suggested that Sun might be mulling an acquisition in the open-source market
in the near future in an effort to continue to grow its cache of open-source software.
"Are there acquisition opportunities out there? Absolutely," Schwartz said. "We will be one of the consolidators in the open-source
industry."
Companies suggested by industry observers as possible acquisition targets for Sun are open-source database company MySQL AB
and Linux vendor Novell Inc.
(Stephen Lawson and Robert McMillan in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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