McNealy's taken the "chairman's option" and says he will focus on developing Sun's international customers and partner relationships.

In the IT industry, it's almost like being put out to pasture where you spend the rest of your days playing golf with the CEOs of the company's top customers.

Not a bad gig if you can get it, and certainly better than constant beatings from the financial analysts.

The company has struggled to turn a profit since 2001 and its stock has been stagnant. And this is despite Sun's recent savvy move aligning itself with Google, Wall Street's pet. But McNealy has left the house in relatively good order after overseeing some drastic changes in recent years.

Sun has settled a long-standing legal dispute with Microsoft, released the Solaris operating system under an open-source licence, handed over most of the development of its UltraSparc processors to Fujitsu Computer Systems, embraced commodity systems based on AMD's microprocessors, and bet on a whole new line of "CoolThreads" multithreaded servers. Put simply, the company has worked hard to reinvent its product line.