Scott McNealy blames accounting principles

You cannot make this up. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems claims that the real reason why the Company is not making money is because of accounting principles. If he were allowed to write the numbers that he wanted SUNW would be making money instead:

"In McNealy's opinion, much of Sun's problem is merely perception--compounded by flawed Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that draw attention away from the company's track record of cash generation.
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It doesn't help that GAAP is a random walk through irrelevancy right now and that the media's primary guideline for quoting financials is GAAP, when we're 16 straight years of cash-flow positive from operations. We cannot have lost billions of dollars in GAAP and somehow magically ended up with $7.5 billion in cash and no SEC investigations. We didn't cheat. We didn't steal that money. People actually felt very good about paying for the invoices we gave them. There's something wrong with the deferred tax asset impairments and all the rest of it, but because it's a GAAP profitability issue, we haven't been able to position ourselves.
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We have massively focused on customer satisfaction in terms of field satisfaction and hardware reliability. We've never had higher customer satisfaction with respect to how our product works, how it stays up out in the field. That was not true back in the (dot-com) bubble. We were just getting the stuff out the door as fast as we could, and that wasn't a good thing.
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During the late 1980s and early 1990s we let Solaris get encumbered as we were trying to build features and compete with mainframe OSes. Plus the fact that we did the AT&T Unix System V Release 4 base, which required us to buy our way out of the SCO license. It just occurred to us, probably six or seven years ago, that we can't do what we want to do with the source code here. We spent a long, long time getting the encumbrances out. They kind of spaghettied themselves deeply into the operating environment. The one thing we learned was just don't let the stuff get encumbered again. That was the mistake we made, by going too fast too quick. By going a little slower and letting the community help, we wouldn't have gotten encumbered. We would have been in better shape if we'd kept it open source along the way.
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We're very close. Last quarter, we lost $3 million dollars. We are nine months into this fiscal year. Year-over-year, on an operating margin basis, we have improved for the first nine months, year-over-year, $550 million. If you believe what the analysts say, it's going to be between a $700 million and $800 million improvement year-over-year in operating margins, pretax, pre-GAAP, pre-one-time any of that stuff. That, on an $11 billion or so revenue run rate, is stunning. If I do that again next year, move over Jack Welch in the hall of fame."

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