Scott McNealy does not seem especially worried about the global financial crisis. That is not to say that Mr McNealy, who founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, is complacent. It is more that he believes his company’s message resonates more in bad times than in good.

“I worry that when customers have more money, they go for things with more bells and whistles,” he says. “Or if they have built a relationship with a vendor, and that vendor quotes them $2.5m instead of $2m, they say ‘I can afford that’. But right now I can have a really serious conversation. People are more willing to change the way they do things than they were before and we can get people to pay attention. We are low cost.”