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Red Hat In Business News
jferg was one of the first people to write about
the coverage in today's Observer in regards to the latest business happenings at Red Hat. The article touches on the launch of RH Advanced Server, but one of the most telling statistics was "Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."
I guess it would make an easier move for a corporation to go from Unix to Linux, but imho Linux's real threat is MS/Unisys, not Unix.
Guess I'm just another anti M$ shashdotter though.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
So does Red Hat have the way out or the way in?
It may just be that building large publicly traded coporations is not the way to go with open source software.
I'm no economist but I see no reason why this should be a terrible thing.
Personally I don't care how corporations fare. I care how individuals fare.
If individuals can succeed, without a corporation then I think that is better anyway. Large organizations tend to carry along overcompensated freeloaders. (Read CEO, CFO, etc.)
I would like to see an economy where individuals are compensated on their merits.
Like I said, I'm no economist and I don't have all the answers but I don't understand why I see articles that intimate that Open Source may fail because it does not work with the old business model.
In my eyes it is the old business model that is failing and a new one needs to be found.
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It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
As the article points out, it's hard to make money selling a free product. IBM is likely to succeed with Linux because they can sell the hardware, non-free software, and (most importantly) the services associated with it. Red Hat might do best if it joined the HP-Compaq family, which might be the best candidate to challenge IBM on the Linux front (especially with Oracle as a partner).
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
If they were to get a hold of Openmail, they really might be able to slash MS right out of the server space - as long as they could keep MS from messing with the protocols.
AFAIK, Exchange is the number one reason to have MS anywhere near the datacenter.
"Red Hat now has 90 percent of its 630 employees working to lure corporations looking to move their computing platform from expensive systems running on the rival Unix operating system to Linux, widely considered to be the more cost-effective choice."
:)
Eventually, this was going to happen. Sure, using 90% of the employees is kinda harsh, but IMHO RedHat's going to have to push at the big iron if they plan on making any sort of success. MS and everyone else is banging on the doors of big server farms already.
Maybe they could hire Brian Valentine to give their sales staff a boost and some spin-doctoring. Just imagine him being a Linux advocate.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
We bought some copies of RedHat because we needed the support.
We recently switched all of our hosting equipment from M$ to RehHat (thanks largely to yours truly and the M$ machines' continued insistance on crash-and-burn computing).
The problem for RedHat is that I can get more and better support from #linuxhelp (take your choice of IRC undernets), Linuxdoc or just about anywhere else than I can from some guy at the corporation. I know the OS, and it doesn't take much time to find answers to stuff I don't know.
When I start trying to do undocumented stuff or I start having bizarro problems with the JVM, shared libraries or something else then the RH support guys don't know as much about the problem as I do.
I want to go to people who write the kernel, the libraries, the product or whatever isn't working and ask them. Online. For free.
I think the comments about going to a "club" style support system makes a hell of a lot more sense.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Exactly.
I'll take it one step further. Large corporations are not the way to go with the Internet in general.
The Internet is a naturally decentralizing force. At the protocol level, it's amazingly decentralized, by design. The tendency is for anything it touches to be decentralized.
Consider software. Open source is the ultimate in decentralized software. Could Open Source exist in anything approaching its current scope if there were no Internet? To be blunt, it couldn't. Look at the progress of the GNU project in 1993, the midpoint of its life to date. This was also just before the great explosion in the 'net.
Consider media. Ten years ago, the average home in the US got, what, 30 channels of TV, plus a newspaper and a few magazines. Now, there are thousands of websites, each offering a different focus and a different point of view.
Consider entertainment. Ten years ago, if you wanted to distribute music on any sort of scale, you had to go to the RIAA or to an indie label that was limited in its reach. If you wanted to have your writing published, you had to go to a publisher of some sort, or pay exorbitant fees to a vanity press. And let's not get started on motion pictures. Now the Internet is allowing real distribution of entertainment media at huge savings (especially when P2P is taken into account).
As the Internet becomes more interwoven into business, business will decentralize. As business decentralizes, wealth and power will decentralize.
In short, it was the great fallacy of the 1990's that you could become rich thanks to the Internet, the dominant effect of which, ultimately, is decentralization.
With Unisys and Microsoft supporting an Anti-Unix campaign, on the basis of Unix being overall more expensive than Windows. Wouldn't this just help Linux? While they spend the money convincing corporations that Unix is to expensive, Linux could ride the wave. Convince customers there product is cheaper than Windows, and no retraining of Unix personnel needed (for the most part.) Not to mention from where I sit (Telecom), it would be a whole lot easier to port existing applications to Linux, than to Windows.
Awesome!
which doesn't typically boost investor confidence. In late March, Chief Executive Officer Matthew Szulik filed to sell 425,000 of his shares after filing to sell 600,000 shares in February, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Company co-founder and Chairman Robert F. Young has unloaded nearly 700,000 shares so far this year, part of a plan in which he sells shares automatically on a daily basis.
When the founders/owners/top execs of a company start dumping shares, that's not a good sign. These guys know how the company is really doing.
You're viewing stock and finance as an emotional decision rather than a business decision. If I buy a stock or investment, I set a goal based on time and value of the investment. When that goal is reached I sell. Period. Unlike Enron where the top brass lied to everybody, Red Hat's management seems to be following a planned decision that at lot of execs (and peons) do all over the place.