Turbolinux Sells Linux Business

bachoom writes "Today, NIKKEI(Japanese story) announced that Turbolinux Inc. sold worldwide Linux business to SRA, Japanese SI company. Turbolinux has burned through at least $100 million raised across three rounds from a dazzling collection of companies including Intel, IBM, and many Japanese companies. Currently, They were sold by $1 million."

Comments

What did they spend 100 Million on?

[Rares Marian]

I use $0 to develop software, and $200+ once to be able to burn the cds it goes on?

Maybe the companies selling Linux shouldn't be spending their money building but packaging it.

sheesh....editors?

[Raleel]

Good morning. Reread that submission. Talk it out. It doesn't have correct grammar.

Re:UnitedLinux

[reaper20]

I don't think Mandrake dropped out, I think they never intented to join.

What was TurboLinux?

[mbourgon]

I remember it mentioned once or twice, but it had about zero mindshare for me.

Here's my thoughts on the different distros. YMWV:
Mandrake - easy to run version of Red Hat
Red Hat - standard distro, supposed to be really cool but I can never get to work right
SuSE - YAST2 is cool
Debian - bitch to install, cake to keep up; apt-get
Slackware - some sort of hard core linux
Turbolinux - *shrug*

What was TurboLinux known for?

New business-model?

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Raise $100 million to sell free stuff.
2: ?
3: Sell for $1 million.
4: Profit!

Hmmm...wait a minute! There is something wrong with the picture here.

I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

I can't really say I'm suprised that they pissed away 100 million in venture capital. Their sales guys seemed to having an adverse reaction to SELLING.

I met with TurboLinux at LinuxWorld 1999 in NYC, this was during the big Linux boon. I was working as an independant consultant, and I had a Fortune 500 client looking to pilot Linux on file and print servers.

The TurboLinux salesguys were flat out fucking rude to me when I told him that I was evaluating different distros to present in my solution. "Oh that's great, just download it and go and install it, what's the big deal?" or some shit he said to me. Idiot had absolutely no idea how business works, if I brought him into my client we both would have been out the door.

Anyway, I wound up running with RedHat (a distro that my client paid for on all systems). I'm not saying that my client expected World Series tickets for a few grand in licensing, but when you have people like that working the booth at a tradeshow it's not the type of people you'd bring into a large and established New York City company.

Re:I'm suprised it took this long

[richj]

Looks like you had no idea how Linux works. Just download it and go and install it, what IS the big deal? Did you need your hand held?

This works around the apartment or on a friend's PC. But, for a second do you actually think that someone in charge of a network infrastructure is going to gamble his reputation on a consultant with a few burned CDs and no support?

What if the pilot was a disaster and he had nobody to call? The client would have been back to the "Windows 2000 Migration Plan" quicker than it would have taken you to feel the foot across your ass as you hit the street.

Your mentality is why companies are afraid to migrate to an Open Source system, you have no concept of assurance.

Lets get over the Mandrake thing, please?

[Vanders]

Why is it that people must label Mandrake as some sort of "Linux for idiots" distribution? So its easy to use, so what, thats bad somehow? What, I have to installing & configure everything by hand to be a "proper" Linux user?

Look, get over it. I've been using Linux since Redhat 5.1 (Whats that, 5 years?). I've written my own dialup scripts, I've configured Xf96config by hand, I've upgraded, installed, built, re-built and hacked on Linux until my eyes bled. So please, don't try and tell me I don't know how to use Linux.

You know what, though? After doing all of that, I became sick and tired of it. All I want to do is get my work done, deal with my email and use the web 95% of the time. So I use Mandrake, which at least lets me do most of it without anoying me.

Oh, not that Mandrake is anything like perfect. Far from it, in fact. Its just the least sucky of the bunch, for me.

Someone cue the Queen baseline...

[MidKnight]

"Dum dum dum ... another one bites the dust."

Hindsight being 20-20 and all, but I don't think this should surprise anyone. During the late 90's lots of techies were excited about Linux because of the freedom it gave them in twiddling the bits of modern operating system themselves. Meanwhile, lots of venture capitalists & MBA's were excited because they saw in Linux an opportunity to start up their own personal Microsoft with virtually zero resources allocated to creating a product. So, throw some marketing $$$ at it, ride the wave, and soon they'd have their own fiefdom of clients running their operating system. They could leverage that installed base to make related deals and rake in the cash.

So, between the techies & the MBA's, who do you think is still excited? (Rhetorical question)

Now, enter popular Linux-related business plan #2: selling a "solution" instead of a software product. Great plan, right? IBM Global Services does that to the tune of $35 billion in revenue! Yeah, but IBM uses their huge hardware profit margins to seed their services plans. Plus they already had Fortune 100 clients as part of their previously installed base to draw from. Oh yeah, and they also have freaking enormous economies of scale to use as well.

My point to this little ramble is that most Linux distros suffer from overly optimistic business plans that, especially in today economy, just don't work. If a Linux distribution is the shining center of your business plan, then in the end you'll be forced to sit at the children's table when it comes to dividing up the revenue pie. So, stories like TurboLinux are pretty common these days, and probably will continue to be for the forseeable future.

Now where'd I put that Queen CD....

--Mid