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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."
Do you think that the sliding sales, not only in Redhat but others as well, could be due to these factors: 1) An increase in broadband over the last couple of years by home users. 2) The popularity of ISO's days after a new release. Instead of going to the store to buy a distribution, I can sit on my ass at home and download three ISO's, burn em to CD, and have everything except documentation. Mandrake has the right idea IMO, with their users club or whatever they call it..Reaping profits through other means.
Certainly better than Microsoft, which is 90% lawyers.
The speed of time is one second per second.
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?
Isn't that just the regular distro without all the man pages and howtos?
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.
Being a student at NCSU, home to RedHat's new corporate offices, I had the privelege yesterday of sitting in on a presentation by Matthew Szulik, CEO of RedHat. Though his presentation was on entreprenuership in NC, the talk quickly diverged into discussions of Open Source and how in the heck they plan on making money. I took the following things away from the lecture:
1) Szulik is a decent guy. His message of measuring entrepreneurial success in social terms instead of the quarterly shareholder statement was quite refreshing. He honestly seems to embrace the ideals of Open Source.
2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology. Though the N&O article may suggest that 90% of their staff is in marketing, it probably suggests instead that they are simply working at making RedHat a better replacement for Unix (this takes marketing AND coders).
3) A number of skeptical members of the audience asked how they would ever make money. There were two answers: subscriptions and services. IBM is the best example of the tremendous market value of services, however Matthew spent more time on the subscription side. Let's be honest. Your average sysadmin doesn't want to have to deal with package management and keeping a system up-to-date. The RHN is a step in the right direction for managing the herculean task... it worked for me. I paid them $60 for a priority membership and I'm most pleased with it.
And yet what has it done for consumers? Relatively little.
Here again, you focus too much on the delivery protocol and ignore the surrounding facts. While the internet and technology may technically enable artists to remove the so-called middle-men from the actual act of transfering the music/data, it really doesn't make RIAA or its respective labels any less relevant. Their function is primarily one of marketing and capital/risk taking. Even if distribution changes radically (which I could well argue against), RIAA continues and will continue to dominate the industry.
Again, this is not terribly different than the PC OEMs. We have the emergence of MORE choices amongst major companies, that continue to retain some 95% of the market, and a bunch of little guys fighting over scraps. The technology may bring offering choices more into the cost effective region, but there's nothing to say the major media conglomerates will not dominate. The major companies enjoy many significant advantages over the little guys. In any event, there's no real significant decentralization happening here if you measure it as consumer mind/hour share or in dollar figures, just the emergence of increased choice.
Here again, I disagree. While I was no cheerleader of the DotComs, the fallacy of the internet WAS that you could get rich quick without really working for it and without having to generate any real value for society...it was thought of as more of an act of arbitrage than anything else. There is still money to be made by exploiting the benefits of the Internet, but it requires some sanity, risk taking, honest to god effort, and willingness to scrounge for capital and take on all the nay-sayers.