Scary Scott goes Bush
Summary Description Simon Vandore meets a political CEO and wonders about putting Bill Gates on ice.

Introduction
Vote 1 Scott McNealy?

Body
Monday's National Press Club speech by the Sun CEO was a rip-roaring success. The tanned, toothy capitalist, dressed for comfort not style, received the kind of ovation that injures hands. It was like a political speech, with less emphasis on the announcement of Sun's investment in the Asia-Pacific and more on McNealy's personal philosophies.
Indeed, Scott McNealy has a political affiliation. He has backed the Republicans in the three most recent US presidential races and is now a prominent George W Bush supporter, advising him on technology policy.
It almost seems ungrateful for a network technology billionaire (earning $US68 million last year, according to Reuters) to oppose Al Gore, whose policy helped create the Internet boom. By comparison, the conservative government in Australia has failed our high-tech industry, as reflected in the dollar. Then again, we're talking about Scott McNealy.
Not only does he think consumers have little privacy online, he opposes privacy online and believes people should be grateful their information is available to the right people. He advocates sacking 150,000 people from the US postal service and replacing them with email (they can be "retrained" and the only obstacle is the silly unions). Sure, he opposes online censorship, but this gives him an audience to espouse family values as he promotes parental supervision of Internet use.
Yes, he is a very conservative politician. Bill Gates wants to control your computer, but Scott McNealy wants your mind. And he's not averse to embellishment -- there was a great line in his speech about using Microsoft products to transmit the word 'attack' to an army. According to McNealy it takes 48 bits in email, 256 bits in HTML, 90,112 bits in Microsoft Word and 268,045 bits in PowerPoint. Great for a laugh! Only trouble is, it's not true -- whip out Office, make a few files containing only the word 'attack' and you'll find the bloat is all in Word (disturbing, but nowhere near the figures quoted).
Anyone who opposes the Microsoft juggernaut becomes a hero and McNealy has it all going for him. There's some old money in his family and he still grins like a frat boy, but McNealy built his own empire. He's sharp as a tack, coming up with great lines in response to questions from the floor. He's also quite a fit sportsperson, and is passionate about ice hockey. I'd love to see Bill out there on the rink.
McNealy has far more charisma than George W Bush himself -- with his grin and his relative youth, he could almost be a conservative Kennedy. However, it's a little ironic that Sun is the anti-Gates and its chief science officer John Gage was the hero of Melbourne's World Economic Forum meeting. I doubt McNealy's politics would go down well with S11.
Maybe this is the sort of thing the protesters were on about -- the influence of multinational corporations on government. Who needs conspiracy theorists when you've got living, breathing, skating examples of CEOs with an agenda?
If you can't send aerograms to the US this time next year, you'll know who to blame.
Vandore is published each Friday on Newswire.