Scott McNealy (born 1954), co-founder, president, and CEO of Sun Microsystems, is an outspoken Silicon Valley maverick. He made his fortune by challenging the computer industry dominance of Bill Gates and Microsoft and championing a network-based computer system based on Sun's Java software, a universal programming language.

McNealy is an unlikely Silicon Valley visionary. He is no technocrat. He didn't drop out of college to found Sun Microsystems. In fact, his background is in Midwestern manufacturing, where his father worked as a top executive in Detroit's automotive industry. Since a twist of fate brought him to California and the helm of Sun, McNealy has worked tirelessly to build the company into one of the world's leading corporations, based on the idea of network computing and a universal operating language. For more than a decade, he nearly single-handedly led the fight against Microsoft and Bill Gates and helped persuade the...