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Warnings to Red Hat about AOL Buyout
andyo from O'Reilly
submitted linkage to a report he wrote over there where he urges Red Hat to
think twice
about letting AOL eat them.
Talks about GNN, as well as Netscape. I'm sure this isn't the last
word we'll hear on this subject either.
Justin Frankel and his nullsoft team created the popular mp3 player for windows, winamp. It was free. It was good. AOL bought them. Justin and the nullsoft team are rich. Winamp is still good and free. It's not called AOL Winamp, the presence of AOL is not there in any new version of winamp.
Perhaps AOL buying Red Hat might not be a terrible thing. Besides, as with the many alternative mp3 players, there are other linux distrobutions out there.
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Check out my blackbox styles
AOL: "Yes of course."
Red Hat: "I have heard all of these nasty rumors that you are only using me for who I am and that you don't care about me at all. Is this true?
AOL: "Perhaps...Oh wait, I mean NO! NO! Who told you such things?"
Red Hat: "Your ex: Netscape."
AOL: "That stupid bitch."
*shrugs*
stupid advertisement
www.angstmonster.org
Winamp is still good and free. It's not called AOL Winamp, the presence of AOL is not there in any new version of winamp.
Sorry about nitpicking, but there is a minor presence of AOL. Try installing a newer version of WinAMP - it'll offer you to place some AOL icons on your desktop. If you decline, nothing will happen. This is a pretty fair deal as far as I'm concernced.
BUT - have you installed ICQ 2001 lately? Without even bothering to ask me beforehand, it neatly placed six AOL links pretty much everywhere where there's place for an icon - start menu top level, start menu in some group, quickbar, desktop, favorites, and some other places. I really had to do a global search for "AOL" to wipe 'em all out.
However, if AOL involvement is limited to randomly placing AOL links somewhere on the desktop which today's Linux users surely steer clear of anyway, I'm all for it.
For all the discussion about whether this would be good or bad for RedHat, linux, open source software, etc. an important point has been neglected. RedHat is a public company. It has an obligation to its shareholders.
If AOL offers enough money, RedHat is obliged to accept, even if they believe that being bought by AOL will mean the end of the RedHat distribution.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
MS got to where they are today by taking advantage of several business practices tied directly to their ability to "lock in" their users and partners. For MS, it's all about leverage, not to higher profits, but to doing what will lock in their users in ways that are profitable to them.
With Linux, that's impossible. Due to licensing and open technologies, you can't hide system calls, you can't obscure protocols or file formats. You can stamp up and down and insist that only you can change the technology, but nobody will realy listen, even if you're using an embedded box. (Thus the arise of the Tivo hacker.)
What MS has been trying to do is to extend their lock-in beyond just desktop software -- to servers (mission 40% accomplished), set-tops, portables, and now to data and the internet itself, first with MSN (where they learned it's not so easy) and now with .Net and Passport (where they'll learn they haven't learned their lesson yet, IMO).
If they were to be successful at creating a model that allows them the same sort of monopoly lock-in with set-top boxes as they have had with software, the big corporate media nonsense you see happening right now would be a pittance. Want to burn a copy of that Universal CD you're listening to? MS wants to be the company that gives you the permission - or prevents you - from doing so. Want to play XBox Madden 2005 against your friend in Springfield? MS will make it possible, with your Passport data from zone.com - and keep a record of what you've done.
This is all wild, idle speculation of course. My crystal ball has been totally wrong before. But MS is close to reaching the upper limit on the desktop, as far as how much revenue they can squeeze out of IT departments for forever upgrading Windows and Office. that's why they're now going to software "rental" plans, anti-piracy raids, and XP installation verification.
That's difficult stuff to push on a bust market that's a little skeptical of the promise of tech, but MS has no choice really; if their stock price does not continue to increase, their employees take the hit. For MS, it could be a case of grow or perish. They already gave more stock out once to counter the employee's needs when the stock stagnated for a while... they surely can't do that during an extended period of time.
Banish any thought from your head about open-source, about GNU, and even about Linux. AOL doesn't know about it (much), doesn't care about it (much) and has become large, rich and influential without it.
AOL wants it for two reasons:
1. So Microsoft can't buy it
2. So they can become larger, richer, and more powerful, which would be partly stymied by #1 above.
Let me explain. AOL/Time-Warner knows its business quite well, and its business has nothing to do with software and everything to do with charging people for access to content they desire.
They can't do that if Microsoft, through MSN, is charging people for access to THEIR content instead. Therefore, they must counter or thwart every attempt by Microsoft to eliminate other options by which consumers might get to ATW (not MS) content. Since Microsoft pretty much owns the desktop, and with the sellout of the Justice Department effort against them has pretty much a clear shot to extend that domination into online content.
And not just web content. We're talking interactive messaging, video-on-demand, online commerce and a bunch of other potentially-moneyed pursuits that AOL wants to have or keep for itself.
I think AOL realistically looked at it and realized that (as a piece I read on CNet the other day pointed out) most consumers online in Murka are not the techs and geeks of the old days, they're just McCitizens who (a) don't know about and (b) don't care about "the desktop," "the operating system," or even the hardware. They just wanna send pictures to their Aunt Edith, buy some stuff off Eddie Bauer, check out some choice pron, or watch "Sudden Impact" for eleventeenth time.
How they do it, they don't care. In the 1930s, nobody knew what tubes were in their Philco radios, they only wanted to hear Jack Benny. Or how about now -- can you name the theatre chain in which you saw "The Matrix?" Do you really care? What color was the wallpaper?
This means AOL has "network appliance" in their heads. They've watched the stuff being done with embedded Linux (like the DVRs that aren't all that popular yet but they work). They looked to see who was the big cheese, the Biggest Name In Linux, and it was RedHat. They buy RH, they can have them develop an AOL Network Appliance, basically a box you turn on and it delivers... AOL and Time-Warner content. No Microsoft anywhere to be seen, which means no chance for Microsoft to hijack future revenue streams.
I personally think AOL is torqued off about the whole go-round with Instant Messaging and vowed never to get dicked by MS like that again.
This is not the end of Open Source. Anyone who thinks so radically overestimates the influence of RH on the Linux world. Yes, it's a big influence, and a lot of the way things are can be traced to them, but if RH vanished tomorrow, someone else would step up. I wouldn't be surprised, as a matter of fact, if AOL didn't slurp up the company, then spin it right back out after working out some very favorable licensing deals and pulling in key development staff.
Their track record is strange: they pretty well fouled up Netscape by forgetting there are non-AOL users of the tool, but they left Nullsoft alone and they're as fine as ever. But the strength of open-source is... we don't "need" any one distribution. If we did, we'd have been hosed long ago.
Turtle
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Best case: AOL either makes some open source enhancements and releases them to the community, or creates a self-contained PC or set-top box to run their OS. Either way, it's a kick in the monopoly pants for Microsoft.
Worst case: DRM. Weakening Microsoft's monopoly sufficiently that MS no longer has to make concessions to the "little guys". And with two major OS manufacturers supporting DRM, how can the SSSCA fail?
I think Andy's wrong in saying that being bought by AOL is a recipe for failure. Here's a list of acquisitions and how they looked from the inside:
- GNN: That was a flop. No question. It was also one of the first buyouts AOL ever did, and frankly, few people at AOL had any idea what to do with the Internet at the time (like much of the rest of the world). The clumsy attempt at infrastructure integration also hurt. At the time, we were still running on an old, clunky, non-modular architecture that was largely unchanged from its days running Q-Link and PlayNet. Also, if I recall, GNN used BookLink's browser, because we hadn't integrated IE yet. I'm surprised the AOL GNN lasted as long as it did.
- Netscape: I think that's going to be a ninth-inning major success. I think getting the Netcenter home page was certainly one goal, but another was hiring lots of experienced Internet developers, and that's been a HUGE win. Also, now that the Microsoft exclusive contract has expired, I definitely think AOL's gonna end up replacing IE with Netscape. The latest Compuserve beta has the Gecko engine. CS has a few million members, so it's a natural testbed for a technology before it goes into full distribution in the AOL client. Bang.. out of nowhere comes W3C compliance and serious competition for IE.
As for AOL failing to pick up Netscape's vision, well... I'm not sure Netscape had any particular vision by the time we bought them. Heck, most of their executive team did stay on and continue to run the show. Any lack of vision is simply something AOL failed to add, not something they took from Netscape.
- CompuServe: Took a dying service running on 36-bit PDP-10s running custom-made hardware (!) and managed to transition the vast majority of it to a web-based service using the AOL client as a dialer/browser. In effect, this is really the service we tried to create so many years before, but it worked this time. True, you never hear anything about it, but it's still more successful than MSN, so who cares?
- Time Warner: Waaaaay too early to call, but I think there will be some wins. These are two huge companies, and they are being very careful about trying to force them to integrate for buzzword's sake. When I left AOL in August, there was a big push to use AOL's developers as TW's technology infrastructure group, they were setting up ways to find-the-smart-guy-in-the-other-company, and they had combined the help-desk and other support infrastructure. I'm not sure how much difference it will make to end customers, but there are certainly efficiencies they can get as a company.
And don't forget about the less well-known purchases:
- Navisoft. Resulted in AOLServer, one of the best-performing web servers ever, which is free and open-source.
- WinAmp. Still doing fine.
- Personal Library Systems (www.pls.com). Resulted in some excellent intelligent-text-search functionality in the AOL service.
I think Red Hat could be great for a few reasons, aside from the obvious potential for giving Microsoft a run for its money, and creating a workable UI for Linux. Most importantly, AOL has one of the most demanding infrastructures of any site anywhere. We were regularly finding bugs in every OS we ran, even the fault-tolerant ones. And the AOL approach to system operation is fairly rigorous, requiring a lot of maintenance and reporting tools and 24x7 hot-pluggability of everything.
Red Hat could really become a leader in stability, performance and monitorability if AOL is buying it for their own back end.
Anyway, food for thought.