CEO of Red Hat Steps Down

bearer_of_bad_news points us to a C|net article which states that Matthew Szulik is stepping down as the president and chief executive of Red Hat. Szulik is citing family health reasons, and he plans to remain chairman of the board. Red Hat has indicated that his replacement will be former Delta Airlines COO James Whitehurst. Quoting the article: "On a conference call, Szulik said Whitehurst stood 'head and shoulders' above other candidates interviewed in a recruiting process. He was a programmer earlier in his career and runs four versions of Linux at home." We discussed Szulik's ascension to CEO back in 1999.

Comments

Delta is perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst Airline i've ever traveled on and sadly their customer service, from top to bottom; is horrid. There are even fully dedicated sites describing how bad the service is. Hell, just see for yourself. Seeing as the COO's job is to make sure that said Corporation or company is operating to serve it's customers at the behest of the almighty dollar. I have a very strong feeling that Redhat is in for an extremely bumpy ride. I'm actually really sad to read that this appointment is going to take place. It's hard not to hold Delta's performance against him really.

Not just any airline, the corp parent of Comair

[RCSInfo]

Remember when this happened? Interesting choice bringing in a manager whose company experienced a very publicized computer crash during his tenure. Hopefully Mr. Whitehurst carries forward some of the lessons learned from that experience.

Too late to do any good for Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm speaking as somebody who saw how close-up how the executive level worked at Red Hat for two years. I saw a lot of bad decisions that were made systematically, dooming Red Hat to a mere niche in the software market.

Red Hat passed up a lot of opportunities, all to satisfy the MBAs and their cronies who took over during Szulik's reign and eased out the founding generation. The problem was that the company became obsessed by meeting financial goals in the short term instead of using their good will and war chest to make deeper, longer term plays to become open source providers for every major software category. Hal Covert (briefly Red Hat CFO) understood this, and Szulik punted him - Covert was probably Red Hat's last chance for greatness.

That's the reason that their stock price has been stagnant for four years - because Red Hat became a predictable, by-the-numbers company that was incapable of making the kind of bold moves that (for example) Google makes. Because he behaved like an accountant instead of an entrepreneur, Szulik squandered Red Hat's future just to find a stable financial base for the present. Worse, he did it at a time when the market was forgiving long term plays left and right, even after the 2000 tech crash. His leaving is about 6 years too late, Red Hat could have been a software giant bringing open source methodology to the entire industry, instead of a mere provider of support for enterprise Linux.

a good man

[davejenkins]

I worked for Red Hat from 2001-2004, and I will say that Matthew Szulik is a good man. He is one of those types that remembers everyone in the room, and remembers your name even though you haven't spoken to him for weeks or months. It was a crazy time, taking the company through the transition from start-up to 'real' company. His emails were sometimes non-sequitir stream of conciousness things, but at other times were very visionary and helpful.

It was great to work for a company where everyone felt they were on a mission-- good times, good times.

Good Luck, Mr Szulik.

Re: Euphemisms

[darkrowan]

I've always understood 'Family Reasons' to mean he wanted to quit, and 'To explore other opportunities' was 'don't let the door hit you on the ass'.