The 25 Who Shaped Dotcoms

Thats the biggest event impacting human civilization in the twentieth
century? While the Second World War, mans landing on moon, the rise and fall of
communism the advent of computers and, more, particularly PCs, women suffrage,
the discovery of penicillin, understanding the DNA structure would be some
popular choices (leaving aside frivolous ones like coming together of the
Beatles or the designing of the brassiere, a biomechanical wonder), there are
many who would select the coming of the Internet (or the World Wide Web or
dotcom) as the landmark option.

The story of ARPANET and the US Defense being the precursor to Internet is
well documented at many places. But what ignited the birth of the consumer
Internet was the registration of the first .com domain by Symbolics in March
1985. The .com domain was initially run by the US Department of Defense only
till 1991, till Network Solutions took oversubsequently Network Solutions was
bought by Verisign.

For a while, it was fashionable to include the .com in company names, though
this became less popular after the bursting of dot com bubble. Sun
Microsystems even used the tagline: "Were the Dot in Dotcom". To commemorate
the silver jubilee, Verisign is leading an industry-wide initiative beginning in
March 2010 to recognize the innovators and leaders that have shaped the first
twenty-five years of .com and in doing so transformed our economy and society.
Dotcom would not be what it is today without these early innovators who paved
the way for the Internet.

As part of this celebration, VeriSign is announcing the top seventy-five
people and companies who have made the most notable impact in shaping the
Internet and ultimately, our world. From this list, a distinguished panel
comprising some of Internets most important influencers, will select the .com
25. Winners of the, .com 25, will be announced at a gala event later this
spring in San Francisco.

We at Dataquest too have done our selection of twenty-fiveranging from
luminaries who founded the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook to the inventor of
Ethernet and the World Wide Web. The founders of Sun and Cisco, two technology
companies seminally associated with Internet, too have been profiled. The point
of interest is to see how much our list matches with the Verisign one.

Pierre Omidyar founder, eBay

Fiancee Made him a Billionaire

This French born Armenian-Iranian entrepreneur was twenty-eight when he sat
down over a long weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually
became a dotcom superbrandthe auction site eBay. The word eBay was made up on
the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his first choice for his web site, echobay,
had already been registered. Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he
came up with eBay. Apparently, eBay was founded to help Omidyars fiance
trade Pez candy dispensers. Remarkably, eBay was profitable since it began in
1996; and as the largest site for e-commerce, it became a dotcom blockbuster. A
successful eBay IPO in 1998 turned Omidyar into a billionaire, who now, with his
wife, runs the philanthropic investment firm Omidyar Networks.

Steve Case founder, AOL

Failure too a Case Study

This former Pizza Hut marketing manager first realized the potential of a
mass online service when in 1991 he co-founded America Online (AOL) from
Quantum, his online services company. Not only did he bring the new service to 1
mn subscribers by 1994, he pioneered several online interactive games and titles
for over a decade till he presided over the $164 bn merger with a media giant,
Time Warner in January 2000. While at that time Case was sitting atop the most
poweful empire of new and old media, the merger quickly ran into trouble during
the dotcom bust, compounded by accounting scandals. The failure of the AOL-Time
Warner merger is the subject of MBA courses, but even that accentuates Case as
one of the dotcom icons.

Meg Whitman ex-CEO, eBay

Penny Wise Auctioneer

If Omidyar conceived and founded eBay, it was Whitman who nurtured it to
make it the worlds largest marketplace where you can buy and sell...almost
anything. And unlike most dotcoms that tried to turn the Net into TV or the
mall, Whitman tapped into its root appeal, communications, letting people trade
among themselves. And in contrast to many dotcoms, she pinched pennies from the
start. From thirty employees and $4 mn in revenues when she joined in 1998,
Whitman helped eBay grow to 15,000 employees and $8 bn in revenues by the time
she resigned in 2008. Repeatedly named by Fortune as one of the top five most
powerful women, Whitman is a Republican candidate for California Governor in
November 2010.

Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon

The Virtual Bookseller

You may be the Bibliophile with an eye for that rare edition or an
affocianado who always likes to pick up the global first edition, chances are
that you have to log in to Amazon to fulfill your wishes. Bezos founded Amazon
in 1994 after making a cross country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up
the Amazon business plan on the way and setting up the original company in his
garage. Known for his attention to minute business process detailsoften
described as a happy-go-lucky mogul and a notorious micromanager, he is an
executive who wants to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is
quoted in all Amazon press releasesBezos is also the brains behind Kindle,
motivated by the strategy that Amazon would soon sell more e-books than virtual
books.

Tim Berners Lee, inventor, World Wide Web

www.timbernerslee......

One of Time magazines hundred most important people of the twentieth
century, Sir Timothy John Berners Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide
Web, making the first proposal for it in March 1989. On December 25, 1990, he
implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server
via the Internet. That makes him the British answer to Neil Armstrongif the
latter expanded the human universe with his first foray to the Moon, Berners Lee
brought everything closer when the first website was put online at CERN on
August 6, 1991, and the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 at
MIT. Incidentally, he later admitted that the forward slashes ("//") in a web
address were actually unnecessary-- "It seemed like a good idea at that time."

Marc Andressen inventor, Web browser & founder, Netscape

Poster-boy Turned Crusader

During his undergraduation at the University of Illinois, Andressen, along
with a co-worker, created the Mosaic web browser and subsequently started Mosaic
Communications in 1993. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the
companys use of the Mosaic name; hence Mosaic Communications changed its name
to Netscape Communications, and its flagship web browser became Netscape
Navigator. Netscapes IPO in 1995 propelled Andreessen into the publics
imagination and its success attracted Microsofts attention. While Andressen
became the poster-boy wonder-kid of the Internet bubble generation, Microsoft
licensed the Mosaic source code from Spyglass (an offshoot of the University of
Illinois), and turned it into Internet Explorer The resulting battle between the
two companies became known as the browser wars.

While Netscape was later sold to AOL, Andressen also founded Opsware, later
sold to HP.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook

The Man Who Monetized Socializing

Being dumped by his girlfriend Erica prompted Zuckerberg to invent a social
networking site called Facemash from his Harvard dorm in February 2004, which
rated women as whether hot or not. Facemash became Facebook following a few
modifications with the idea coming from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy,
which had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory
with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the Facebook.
Zuckerbergs Facebook started off as just a Harvard-thing, until he decided to
spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Yale and others. Finally he
moved to Palo Alto, and over the summer of 2004, Facebook was launched as a
corporate entity. After several lawsuits by its co-founders, in 2007, Facebook
sold 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 mn. With over 350 mn users, Facebook is
the face of social networkingin fact a Zuckerberg biopic is slated for release
in 2010.

Sabeer Bhatia, founder, Hotmail

The Hot Male?

While working on the concept of a web based database in a startup called
Firepower Systems, Bhatia realized the potential of a web based email system,
and thus decided to create one called HoTMaiL (the uppercase letters spelling
out HTMLthe language used to write the base of a webpage). In order to attract
attention, the e-mail service was provided for free and revenue was obtained
through the advertising on the website. Draper Fisher Ventures invested $300,000
on the project and the service was launched on July 4, 1996. The concept of free
email was bornperhaps Internets biggest ever contribution to human
civilization. In less than six months, the website attracted over 1 mn
subscribers. As the interest in the web based email provider increased,
Microsoft eventually took notice and on December 30, 1997 (Bhatias twenty-ninth
birthday), Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for a reported sum of $400 mn. Though
Bhatia ventured into several other projects subsequently, he never managed the
same limelight againnot even with reports of his impending marriage to
Aishwarya Rai.

Jack Dorsey, founder, Twitter

Not Just for Birds

In Oakland in 2000, Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis,
and emergency services from the web. Building on dispatching and inspired in
part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he got the idea at
that time for real-time status communication. He decided that SMS text suited
the status message idea better and built a prototype for Twitter in two weeks.
He co-founded Obvious, a podcasting startup which then spun off into Twitter. As
CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of VC fundingthough improving
up-time was initially given more priority over generating revenues, considering
its universal popularity now, Twitter is looking at channels to monetize it.
Meanwhile, Dorsey has now gone Square, a mobile payment startup that allows
iPhone to accept credit card payments.

Shawn Fanning, founder, Napster

They Took Away his Music

While working summers at his uncles Internet company Chess.net, Fanning
started writing the code for Napster, a program that could provide an easy way
for downloading music. The system was launched in 1999with it was born the
peer-to-peer system; for millions of netizens around the world it meant free
music. Soon after, however, Napster was the target of several music
industry-backed lawsuits, which ultimately ended up causing the cessation of the
service. Best Buy purchased Napster in a line of succession from companies such
as Roxio, and Sony-BMG. Though Napster lost the case, the concept started by him
led to the initiation of numerous other similar softwares such as Morpheus and
BitTorrent. Incidentally, in a cameo appearance in The Italian Job where Fanning
played himself, he was accused by Seth Greens character of stealing Napster
from him while he was taking a nap.

Leonard Bosack/Sandy Lerner, founders, Cisco

The Networking Couple

Credit for the ubiquitous router (no Internet without that) should go to the
colorful couple Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner (she was the first to appear
nude in a business magazine Forbes). Apparently, Lerner and and her then
boyfriend and now ex-husband Bosack designed the first router so they could
connect the incompatible computer systems of the Stanford offices that they were
working in to send love letters to each other. By the end of 1984, they had
formed Cisco Systems (after San Francisco) and begun manufacturing routers in
their living room. In 1986, Bosack resigned from Stanford amid allegations of
impropriety to work at Cisco full time. That year, they received funding of $2.5
mn from Sequoia Capital after seventy-seven unsuccessful proposals to other VCs.
Between 1984 and 1992, Cisco grew at an average rate of 200% per year with
little or no advertising. On August 28, 1990, the management team fired Lerner.
Upon hearing the news, Bosack resigned to show his support. The two immediately
sold their founder shares in Cisco for an estimated $170 mn. Neither are in
Cisco any more, but the legacy continues to thrive.

Larry Page/Sergey Brin, founders, Google

Search Researchers

Brin and Page originally met in March 1995, during a spring orientation of new
computer science PhD candidates at Stanford. Page was in search of a
dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the
World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph. He focused on
the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the
number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page.
In his research project, nicknamed BackRub, he was soon joined by Brin. A
polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis
topic, Brin found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. They developed the
PageRank algorithm, and realized that it could be used to build a superior
search engine; the intial version of Google was made available in August 1996 on
the Stanford site. In 1998, Google got incorporated; Page ran Google as
co-president along with Brin until 2001 when they hired Eric Schmidt as chairman
and CEO. Both Page and Brin now earn an annual compensation of one dollar, but
their names have become etched in the history of human civilization.

Jerry Yang founder, Yahoo!

The Portals Guru

While studying electrical engineering at Stanford, Yang co-created in April
1994 with David Filo a website consisting of a directory of other websites
called "Jerry and Daves Guide to the World Wide Web". It was renamed "Yahoo!"
(an exclamation). As it became very popular, Yang and Filo realized the business
potential and co-founded Yahoo!, Inc in April 1995. They took a leave of absence
and postponed their doctoral programs indefinitely. The concept of Internet
portal was born, though Yahoo! has from then been upstaged by Google on almost
all fronts. Ironically, while Google has adopted a tough stance against Chinese
authoritarianism, Yang, despite his Taiwanese origin, has been criticized for
his role in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao who used a Yahoo! address
to notify a pro-democracy website that the Chinese government ordered the
Chinese media not to cover the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
protests. Yahoo! provided the Chinese security agencies with the IP addresses of
the senders, the recipients and the time of the message. Tao was subsequently
convicted for "divulging state secrets abroad". Yang was heavily criticized and
Reporters Without Borders called Yahoo! "a Chinese police informant".

Jimmy Wales/Larry Sanger, founders, Wikipedia

The Encyclopedia Makers

An expert-written online encyclopedia in project, Nupedia, was launched in
the late 90s (with Larry Sanger as full-time editor-in-chief) by Bomis, a
web-advertising-selling firm owned by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell and Michael Davis.
With the writing on content for Nupedia extremely slow (only twelve articles in
the first year), Sanger thought of using wiki as a platform after he was
explained the concept by a computer programmer, Ben Kovitz. Wales set one wiki
up and put it online on January 10, 2001, and Wikipedia got conceived as a
feeder project for Nupedia. There was considerable resistance on the part of
Nupedias editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a wiki-style
website. Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and it
was soon launched on its own domain on January 15, 2001. The bandwidth and
servers (located in San Diego) used for these projects were donated by Bomis.
Wales made Wikipedias first edit, a test edit with the text "Hello, World!".
The oldest article still preserved (there are 14 mn articles now with 3.2 mn in
English) is UuU, created on January 16, 2001, at 21:08 UTC.

Caterina Fake/Stewart Butterfield, founders, FlickR

Visual Pioneers of web 2.0

Trust a most photogenic husband-wife duo (though now divorced) to launch the
popular photo-sharing service, FlickR, and its parent company Ludicorp in
Vancouver in February 2004. The service emerged out of tools originally created
for Ludicorps Game Neverending, a web-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG).
Flickr proved a more feasible project, and ultimately Game Neverending was
shelved. The service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed
in blogs and social media. No wonder, therefore that FlickR is considered to
have ushered in the so-called Web 2.0 features such as social networking,
community open APIs, tagging, and algorithms that surfaced the best, or more
interesting content. In March 2005, Yahoo! acquired FlickR and in 2006, the
services were updated from beta to gamma-intended to be tongue-in-cheek to
indicate that the service is always being tested by its users, and is in a state
of perpetual improvement. While both Fake and Butterfield left Yahoo! in 2008,
in May 2009, White House official photographer Pete Souza began using Flickr as
a conduit for releasing White House photos.

Chad Hurley/Steve Chen/Jawed Karim, founders, YouTube

Video Made them Kings

From Gandhi parodies to MMS of DPS peccadilloes to being official IPL
partnerYouTube has courted controversies not just in India, but across the
globe. Its origin was however much less controversialthe PayPal logo designer
Hurley along with two other PayPal engineers, Chen (of Taiwanese origin) and
Karim (son of a Bangladeshi immigrant who grew up in erstwhile West Germany),
founded YouTube in January 2005, supposedly to share videos from a dinner party
with friends in San Francisco. Sending the clips around by email was a bust as
the emails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos
online was a headache. So they got to work to design something simpler. What
obviously helped was the bonus Hurley had received when eBay had bought PayPal
for $1.54 bn in 2002. YouTube soon became one of the most popular sites and it
was sold off to Google in 2006 for $1.65 bn, turning the three overnight into
multi-millionaires. While Chen is still the CTO of YouTube, Hurley is now busy
trying to invest in one of the F1 teams.

Lars Perkins, founder, Picassa

His Passion is Photography

Not a dotcommer strictly, but the efficacy of Perkins digital photo
organizer tool made it most lucrative on the net, courtesy Google. As an
executive at Pasadena based business incubator, Idealab, his mission was to
create companies. A camera enthusiast, he figured digital photography was a lot
of fun, but way too complicated. So he dreamed of Picassa, a blend of Pablo
Picasso, the phrase mi casa for my house and pic for pictures, a software
program that takes the pain out of finding photos stored on a computer hard
drive. He was the CEO of Picassa when it was snapped up by Google in 2004. For
two years, when he was director, product management at Google, his weekly
schedule involved working one day at home, commuting by his personal airplane to
Google campus in Mountain View, California; another day and the other three days
flying from Pasadena to Google offices in Santa Monica. Subsequent to Google, he
has served as interim CEO of yousaidit, a search engine integrated with social
media, when he was one of the biggest corporate donors to Obamas presidential
campaign.

Ray Tomlinson, inventor, email

The Mail Man

Because it is used in every email address and many tweets, you might be
forgiven for thinking that the remarkably common symbol @, which
English-speakers know as the at sign, but Italians call a snail, and south
Slavs know as a monkey, is a fairly recent invention. It was a Florentine
merchant named Francesco Lapi who used the symbol @ in a letter written 474
years ago on May 4, 1536. The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it
evolved over the centuries into commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase
at the price of in records of transactions written by English merchants.
Thats why the symbol was sitting on a computer keyboard in 1971 when an
engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first email address to
send the first email. But what was the first email? Tomlinson says he has no
idea, "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other.
The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten
them." The first email content may now be lost, but email/@) still remain the
most popular dotcom application/symbol, straddling web 1.0, 2.0 and may we say
3.0.

Marc Benioff founder, Salesforce.com

Softwares Dotcommer

Many believe Benioff should go down in historyat least the history of the
software industryfor his near single-handed invention of on-demand computing.
After all, he launched not just another Internet site/service, but brought
software to the net itself when he launched Salesforce.com from a rented San
Francisco apartment in 1999, with the defined mission as The End of Software.
With this, he changed the software markets paradigm: No Software wasnt just
a marketing sloganit was a mantra. Today, ten years on, Salesforce.com is a
billion dollar company and the software industry has been irreversibly changed.
Benioff should occupy the same pedestal as Bill Gates or Larry Ellisonironic
considering he was with Oracle for thirteen years and was its youngest VP ever;
and he has publicly announced, more than once, that "Part of our mission is to
end Microsoft". He has long evangelized Software-as-a-service (SaaS), coined
Platform-as-a-service, pioneered the cloud revolution and now with Chatter,
plans to corporatize social networking.

Reid Hoffman, founder, LinkedIn

Silicon Valleys Most Connected

When Hoffman graduated from Stanford, his plan was to become a professor and
public intellectual. But, soon the illusion was over as he realized that
academics write books that fifty or sixty people read and I wanted more
impact. The opportunity for making more impact came in 2003 when he launched
LinkedInthe social network now primarily used for business connections and job
searching. At that time, he was still the EVP of PayPal in charge of business
and corporate development; and PayPal had just got acquired by eBay in 2002.
Reid was LinkedIns founding CEO for the first four years before moving to his
role as chairman and president, Products in 2007 (now executive chairman). He is
often called the most connected man in all of Silicon Valley; has strong
relations with most central players in web 2.0; coined the term second
generation web entrepreneurs is on the board of Mozilla, Burger King, Vendio,
Six Apart, Kiva.org, Tagged, Zynga and invested in Facebook, Ironport, FlickR,
Digg, Grockit, Ping.frm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate and Last.fm
among others. Want to check Hoffmans entire professional career? Just click on
his LinkedIn profile.

Philip Rosedale, founder, Second Life

Second Life was his First Love

"Im not building a game. Im building a new continent." It was with this
vision to demonstrate a viable model for a virtual economy or a virtual society
that Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab created Second Life (Philip Linden in Second
Life avatar), an Internet scale virtual world in 2003. This was after he left
RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab in 1999 after a street in Hayes Valley.
During a 2001 meeting with investors, Rosedale noticed that the participants
were particularly responsive to the collaborative, creative potential of Second
Life. As a result, the initial objective-driven, gaming focus of Second Life was
shifted to a more user-created, community-driven experience. Second Lifes
status as a computer game is frequently debated. Unlike a traditional computer
game, Second Life does not have a designated objective, nor traditional game
play mechanics or rules. Second Life has an internal currency, the Linden Dollar
that can be used to buy, sell, rent or trade land or goods and services with
other users. Some companies even generate US dollar earnings from services
provided in Second Life. First Brazil and then South Korea even have their own
independently-run portals to Second Life, operated by intermediaries.

Jarkko Oikarinen, inventor, chat

He Made People Chat Up

Finland and technology? What immediately comes to mind is either Nokia or
Linus Torvalds (the father of Linux). Not so much Jarkko. Thats not being fair
though to the originator of the now ubiquitous chat, which along with email,
search and blog ranks as the most popular web application. But, the man whose
homepage boldly flaunts "If it is not logic, its magic. If it is not magic, it
is female logic" is not complaining; in fact he is rather unassuming about the
phenomenon he created. It was while working at Oulu University in August 1988,
he wrote the first Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server and client programs, which
he produced to replace the MUT (MultiUser Talk) program on the Finnish BBS
OuluBox. IRC was the first Internet chat network; it was used to report on the
1991 Soviet coup dtat attempt throughout a media blackout and also during the
first Gulf War. Jarkko continued with IRC development (he is there known as the
Wiz) and later co-authored the IRC protocol with Darren Reed. IRC client
software is today available for virtually every computer OS that supports
TCP/IP; its the basis for human communication in the twenty-first century.

Vint Cerf, inventor, TCP/IP

The Real Father of Internet?

While he was an assistant professor at Stanford, Cerf conducted research on
packet network interconnection protocols; this led to the co-designing of the
TCP/IP protocol suite (the basis of Internet) along with Robert Kahn (his fellow
student at UCLA who was working on the ARPANet hardware architecture).
Subsequently after a stint as a program manager for the US Department of Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding various groups to develop
TCP/IP, Cerf moved to MCI Digital where he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the
first commercial e-mail service to be connected to the Internet. Later, he was
instrumental in the funding and formation of the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the entity responsible for assigning and
managing domain names and IP addresses. As chairman, Cerf was at the helm of
affairs when Verisign successfully filed a lawsuit to clear the ambiguity over
ICANNs affairs.

Jorn Barger/Peter Merholz/Evan Williams, inventors, blog

When Diaries Got Dotcommed

A prolific Usenet poster since 1989, Barger started his Robot Wisdom site in
February 1995, publishing essays and resources on James Joyce, AI, history,
Jadaism, Internet culture, hypertext design, and technology trends. On December
17, 1997, Barger began posting daily entries on links to articles about
politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting and amounted
to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits. He
coined the term weblog. The even shorter form, blog, was coined by Peter
Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog Shortly
thereafter, Williams at Pyra Labs used blog as both a noun and verb ("to blog"
means "to edit ones weblog or to post to ones weblog") and devised the term
blogger in connection with Pyra Labs Blogger product. Since 2002, blogs have
gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping, and
spinning news stories, including the financial and political goals of the
US-Israeli relations and the Iraq War.

Scott McNealy/Vinod Khosla/Andy Bechtolshein/Bill Joy, founders, Sun
Microsystems

The Sun Rose...and Set

On February 12, 1982 Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim and Scott McNealy, all
Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a
primary developer of BSD, joined soon after. The Sun name was derived from the
initials of the Stanford University Network. While Suns first Unix workstation
was conceived by Bechtolsheim, the company was profitable from its first quarter
in July 1982. Though Sun went public in 1986, it was during the dotcom bubble
that Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and
expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for
web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by VC-funded startups
building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presence in the expectation of
high traffic levels that never materialized. The marketing pashas with glee
coined the tagline We are the dot in dotcom. The share price in that
particular period increased to a level that even McNealy or Joy was hard-pressed
to defend. Both the dotcom (and consequently) Sun bubble burst in 2001 and
McNealy (other founders had left by then) were left to pick up the pieces and
chart a new position for the company.