Success Quote by Scott McNealy

McNealy’s line is a sales pitch dressed up as inevitability, and that’s why it lands. By comparing networked computing to electricity and telephone service, he borrows the cultural authority of “the grid”: boring, reliable, paid for by the month, and no longer worth arguing about. The metaphor isn’t just explanatory, it’s coercive. If computing is like power, then owning your own servers starts to sound like running a generator in the backyard - eccentric, wasteful, vaguely irresponsible.

The specific intent is to normalize outsourcing and centralization at the exact moment those ideas still felt risky. Sun Microsystems, McNealy’s kingdom, made its money on enterprise hardware and networked systems; he needed businesses to believe that the future belonged to shared infrastructure, not personal machines. So the quote smuggles a business strategy into a story about progress. “Makes more sense than ever” isn’t evidence, it’s momentum: a nudge to stop debating and start migrating.

The subtext is also about control. Utilities are regulated, standardized, and difficult to escape. If computing becomes a utility, the winners aren’t the tinkerers; they’re the providers who own the pipes, set the terms, and charge rent for capacity. In the late-90s/early-2000s swirl of dot-com optimism and enterprise anxiety, that promise of simplicity - fewer IT headaches, predictable costs, outsourced complexity - was the emotional hook. McNealy is selling relief, and calling it common sense.