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Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate
jasonbowen writes "In this article from ZDnet, Redhat claims a 90% return subscription rate for its Enterprise line. Sounds like Redhat is doing just fine providing a quality product for people that want to pay the money for it." (And for people who don't want to pay money for it, too.)
Is this the result of corporations really beleiving in the quality of the product, and its usefullness in their corporation?
Or have corporations just not yet had the chance to fully investigate the red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.
We have been QA'ing a new default burn for desktops for the past 6-8mnths, in the meantime, we keep purchasing what we had before.
If there is going to be a dip because of the drop of the desktop line I wouldn't expect it untill at least next quarter
paul reinheimer
After months of therapy, I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm upset because RHN is gone. They locked my entitlements and prefs, and so now I can't manage the scores of machines I have deployed. I'm reasonably okay with the whole Enterprise-Fedora concept where there is one supported enterprise product and one free personal edition, but I just feel kinda worried about when my RHN subscription goes away for good and another buffer overflow exploit comes around.
Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?
What do you think Fedora is?
It's not like RedHat just handed them a site and told them to get on with it. RedHat employees are very actively involved with the whole thing, and are contributing tons of code.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
This doesn't say jack about conversion rate from 6.x-9.x Red Hat to the Enterprise product though.
I am interested in that. You would assume that people who bought the enterprise product would pay for their support - otherwise why buy it?
Sounds like the bleeding obvious to me. They lowball an expectation and their analysis is proved flawed. This is news? Must be a slow day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The report doesn't suggest overnight riches for Redhat. It doesn't say anything about their financial position either. What it does say is that Redhat wants a new call center. This is most likely going to coast a fair bit so don't expect them to spend more time on fedora from now on (although from what I understood they are still actively involved with that as is).
Sig? What's this sig thing I hear people talking about?
That is a pretty blatant example of doublethink propaganda. Red Had drops support and release for RHx, and we see an article singing their praises on how great a job they're dowing throwing Fedora over the fence because they can claim some customer retention on the Enterprise front.
No it's not a great job, the reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support. For an Operating system they mostly package, not author, they are doing a really bad job at providing affordable support options or stable releases that the ordinary user might want (like the vast majority of Linux users using RHx who were abandoned). Of course they have explicitly said they're not interested in that business, (probably abandoned to protect margins in the Enterprise business). Why anyone would pretend this is all rosy and RH are doing a great job after leaving such a gaping wound on the Linux desktop is beyond me.
One word: Debian!
This is about the *existing* RHEL users keeping the product...
I suspect a fair few RH9 people (like me) are now evaluating their options. There are several distributions out there that the non-enterprise peeps can take a stab at before they decide to fork out for the RHEL edition.
There are a couple of advantages that RH offer - they are the de-facto standard, so if you use qualified software from a supplier, chances are it'll be qualified on RH, not debian...
They also offer support, and I've had to use it when installing on troublesome motherboards, but once something is installed, I'm reasonably ok on my own, so this isn't such a big deal for me...
The business imperatives to stay with RH are significantly less than with MS, so I would say 90% is a good figure, despite MS probably being able to claim higher than that. There is more choice on the linux OS, that's all there is to it...
Random thoughts...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
If they are doing so well as the report suggests, maybe they can dedicate some more time to developing the free (money) ones as well, to entice new people to Red Hat who might be buying the enterprise additions.
Hint: RedHat is a corporation. Corporations like to make money. They've tried the "Free as in $0 to entice people to pay for Linux" route for years now. They're scaling that back significantly, and putting more effort in the purchase-only version.
Do you think it was working well for them, and they decided that it would be a good move to become less profitable? I mean, I know that you know a lot more about the economics of free software than Red Hat does....maybe you should send them an email explaining the obvious.
People tired of having to go through the process of creating RHN demo accounts for EACH machine just so they can install the security patches to vulnerabilities coming out, apparently, several times a week, as of late.
Hell, even Microsoft doesn't force you to go through a lengthly (or much of any, besides activation) registration in order to use Windows Update. It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.
Now that Red Hat is becoming more popular, I see these problems only getting worse.
> red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.
Kaput? No. Overpriced? Hell yes. (More like out of their fucking mind - desktop Linux can't cost more than Windows yet)
think about it: RH claims 90% of their customers are loyal because they are keeping their subscriptions. the important question is:
How many customers of RH did actually pay for a subscription before the change? And from those how did not pay (but were loyal Rh customers), how many are sticking with it?
The ones who paid before the kaboom do not care in spending bick bucks. The users who supported redhat but could not afford such a pricey OS definitely will not stick with it -- as it is the case in Academia! If RH were smart, they would offer site licenses for academia and big clusters.
I am willing to be my officemate (he is a good catch) that from the RH users who did NOT pay in the first place, 90% will switch to another OS if RH does not offer something "in-between". How about also releasing this information, RH?
(As one always learns in statistics: the outcome depends on HOW you present the data, and not what it actually looks like...)
your question makes sense and does not. if i use redhat and am happy, then i will recommend it to others, potential paying customers. if i am not happy, i will make bad publicity for them. it is a matter of the definition of "customer", but if you provide me with a service, regardless if i pay for it or not, i am your customer.
It really pisses me off that when people complain about the disappearance of Redhat Linux (consumer version), everyone assumes that they wanted a freeby?
I ALWAYS paid for RH linux, because it was stable and did what I wanted, and had supported updates.
Fedora does not meet this requirement, and I don't need a corporate version.
I want to keep paying and getting RH linux.
But Redhat screwed me. Why should I do business with some that treats me that way?