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Interview with Red Hat's New CEO
mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
But does he run Linux?
root@allevil:~#
Is that still around?
Under the new Red Hat CEO:
* Another halfhearted desktop push that ends up being nothing more than coming up with another name for the same old distribution with some cosmetic changes to their last failed consumer distro - new logos, desktop theme, etc.
* More hollow tough talk while Microsoft eviscerates the Linux vendor market with their 'vast unnamed patent' strategy that is working very well with companies like Novell continuing to divide Linux distros into 'scary unsafe about to be sued at any moment' and 'safe for business use and integrates well with Windows' versions
* Will be gone just like the old CEO in not too long a timeframe
I think this guy is a hands-on bussiness guy that "gets" open source. Im not sure I want to believe he is a "believer", but he plays it well enough to think that he "gets" what we, the community, want.
He says that redhat should be making about 8 times more money than it does now. I agree with him. The spectacular growth linux as a plataform has enjoyed is spread out between many other distros, and thus the next step is convincing some in other linux platform that the redhat value proposition is a better way to go. If I was him, for example, id introduce a discount and some free consulting if you're migrating from competing platforms.
Remember, subscription is a long term bussiness. You dont get your wealth of money until time passes and youre able to amortize the initial costs of getting your distro to the customer and deploying a sales network, so, as a bussiness model, I think redhat and suse can ONLY grow in revenue (I love this FOSS thingie, it will make many of us a decent living doing what we love).
Now, i really know certain stuff that goes on inside redhat (im not directly related to them, but lets say they've been my clients at some point in time). This is a very cost-effective operation, totally commited to increasing revenue in every little single aspect of it. The last CEO was very effective in conveying a corporate philosophy that saves and saves and saves money and resources, and i think it has resulted in supperb products and services, from my POV, the best in the industry; and not in huge salaries for executives and the kind of corporate shit that kills good companies.
I wish the best to redhat with this new guy they have, I think he should be focusing in providing a better and better positioning for the redhat brand in the IT support and services industry; and to leverage the potential of the Red Hat Exchange idea. If they hit it with that one, they'll grow fourfold in less than two years, mark my words.
NO SIG
I just wanted to know whether he'd switch Redhat to apt and .deb in the near future, and whether he sees a significant role for KDE in Redhat's core business plans. In my opinion, Redhat should switch to apt and KDE.
Great News! I hope this guy does as much as he speaks!
Red Hat is a great company, has very good products, but still has to enhance its support. Also, with Ubuntu getting market share on desktops, and SuSE trying to grab some piece of the servers pie (although I don't think they will after the Microsoft deal), Red Hat needs someone like him to lead it so that it keeps its leadership.
I wish well to Mr. Whitehurst and sincerelly hope he can make Red Hat grow as much as he plans to!
Hey Jim, you can play ogg vorbis on an Ipod, so fear not. You just need to replace its built-in O/S with Linux first. Rockbox makes this possible, and easy to do. http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005957
Isn't their core business providing SRPMS to CentOS?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Lets hope he embraces and extends an olive branch to the CentOS folks for their contributions.
Enough of this Fedora crap..... Bring back Redhat Linux
They'd all make a fortune.
And it would give Linux the software it so desperately needs to survive.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"I believe what you believe ... blah blah blah ... trust me, I'm good, not evil ... blah blah blah ... again, I believe what you believe ... we're great, but we should be 10x better ... blah blah blah ... you need to work harder, focus more, and buy our stuff .. blah blah blah".
If this is "News For Nerds" to you, then you've been living under a rock for the last 30+ years...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
"It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses" - whoops, looks like his corporate speak backing statement is talking about cutting costs, not top line growth. You can make a company more profitable with these tasks, but it doesn't outline how you're going to make more money.
As someone whose job involves deploying Redhat on s390 systems, I hope they put some more effort into working with vendors for our platform. It's not uncommon to find something supported on SUSE but not on Redhat (even though it works on both, it still needs to be certified to make through the corporate red tape).
I looked into buying the RH supported version of JBoss recently. The LOWEST priced supported version is $2000 per year! I'm not exactly sure what market RH is going for here, maybe the Fortune 500 and large institutions, but it sure as hell isn't me.
I'll stick with the unsupported free version, thanks. I just can't see getting $2000/year value for just some extra support I'll likely never use anyway.
AccountKiller
And wanting to increase sales to 5b means no more fedora, or most anything else they cant charge for.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
His refusal to buy iPod has also to do with that stuff called "vote-with-your-wallet" that /.ers are often talking about.
...On the other hand, at least the iPod isn't some PlaysForSure crap...
Yes, by buy an iPod and replacing the firmware with Rockbox he *could* get OGG/Vorbis to play on his iPod.
*BUT*, by doing so, he would be giving money and thus encouraging a company that refuses to support OGG/Vorbis out of the box and that is known to actively discorage homebrew hacking of their hardware (see iPhone).
He would be better giving his money to a company that does openly support OGG/Vorbis (Samsung or the countless no-name asian USB stick/media players) or at least a company that publicly encourage 3rd party developers and 3rd party media codecs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So in other words, he's saying all the right things he needs to in order to get the job.
Kudos on that golden parachute, bro! It's a doozie. Hopefully you can sucker the next company you are at in three years into giving you one just as big... if not bigger! Keep this stuff up, and you could end up making Eric Schmidt kind of money.
I got an iPod nano 2nd generation when I bought my macbook, and I would really like to put rockbox on it because I have a lot of songs in vorbis format. Unfortunately Apple started encrypting their firmware in so that people can't easily replace them. I believe the same thing is true with most of the new iPods, not just the nanos, so be sure to check the rockbox site to make sure it's compatible before buying an iPod if you're counting on the vorbis compatibility.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Come back in a decade and tell me how Ubuntu's growth compares to Red Hat's. Marketing campaigns don't butter the bread.
He picked three things (at Delta: safe, clean, on-time), put a feedback loop on them, and talks about them this way:
That doesn't sound like happy-happy where's-my-axe blather to me.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
"And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million."
Any company would be glad to be doing $500 million when the core R&D for their product was done for free by AT&T and the core implementation was done for free by unpaid idealists. How much money would they be making if they had to pay for all that work?
countdown to new CEO saying "I love Microsoft!" and signing a deal?
ten years? Ubuntu is taking a chunk out of Redhat in the here and now. when Redhat shafted me and all those who made redhat #1 by making their "free as in beer" distro totally different from what they sell, I left. As for CentOS, leaving free access to a third party who forever must lag behind (and can't duplicate all of) RedHat doesn't make for a unified community.
There's a reason why the popular distros are Debian based. Apt just plain works better than rpm. It handles dependency management far better, and if a repository is down, installers like apt-get based on apt note that the repo is down and keep right on going. I went from FC6 to Debian Etch a year ago, and installation has worked so much better since then that my main regret about Debian is that I didn't do it right to begin with and start my Linux experience with it.
SuSE YaST works better than yum for software installation because of some elaborate hacks. I see it as a clever, impressive way of avoiding the basic problem.
A year or so ago, RH promised to fix rpm to make it as useful as apt. If Red Hat wants to take over the Linux world, either making rpm as good as apt or switching its package management over to apt is where they should start. A good package management environment would probably save Red Hat enough money to allow them to break even within a year on their investment even if it doesn't increase their sales.
Given a choice, I'd rather see them fix rpm. Software monocultures make me nervous, and a better rpm would probably make conversions via Debian alien work better on this box.
Tech Public Policy stuff
from Can an airline exec run Red Hat? You'd be surprised Whitehurst has a geek streak. On last night's earnings conference call Szulik noted:
As we went through the recruiting process, we did interview a number of people that I am sure are familiar to this audience listening from the technology industry and what we encountered, of course, was in many cases a lack of understanding of open source software development, a lack of understanding of our model. And as importantly for me, the open mindedness that would come to both the creation of new economic models and contemporary thinking as it relates to software development.
In my first meeting with Jim Whitehurst, we discussed the four Linux distributions that he was running on his home personal network. He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer up until the time that he was at BCG (Boston Consulting Group). So we are getting a technically savvy executive who happens to have strong operational, financial, and strategic skills and it was in my view that in comparison to his peers that were finalists for the job, that he stood head and shoulders above, in light of all of the qualities that we were looking for in my successor. Don't make assumptions about the suits the same way they make assumptions about us (the geeks).
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
"So, it's purpose is to make management of the repositories easier, is it? Now I see the problem!"
I think you are trying to be ironic here. Think it twice then, since your assertion is to be very seriously considered. Obviously nothing is black and white but you can bet that the "pushing end" of any technology can be the strong factotum upon its success (you can't buy what is not in sale and no matter how good is say apt for the end user if there are no packages for it because package producers prefer using yum's format that's what they'll use).
I switched from MP3 to ogg in 2003, and I'm not about to reburn hundreds of CDs just because Apple can't be bothered to include ogg support. They should have been supporting ogg years ago.
Jim Whitehurst is on the right side of this issue, and Apple would do well to pay attention.
I bugged out of Fedora as of FC6. I don't know if it's still around, but there was a version of apt-get for Fedora available via repository as of then. I just looked:
apt-get is the automatic dependency resolver originally used by Debian. It works over dpkg in a similar way to how yum, smart or up2date use RPM. It is used to install packages and their dependencies automatically. It has been ported to use RPM and rpmlib by Conectiva and has been made available for Fedora. It is currently maintained at http://apt-rpm.org/ by PanuMatilainen from Red Hat.
As for the 'popularity' of Fedora / SuSE / RHEL. . . I'm sure that Dell took it into account when they picked Ubuntu as a distro for their new consumer Linux boxes. And laughed.
I'd fart in your general direction, but you'd probably enjoy that so I won't bother. At this point in time, ignorant zealots like you are a bigger obstacle to mass-market Linux than Microsoft is.
Perhaps if you were to do hard things like get acquainted with your own distro, you'd be less of a fanatic and more useful.
Tech Public Policy stuff
> ...program menu at the top of the screen...
How do you turn this feature on....I've never seen it under Gnome?
First of all he did not say that he would not buy a portable media player. Just not the iPod.
If one searches for "ogg players" they will get a great list.
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/PortablePlayers
Very easy. Perhaps he did just that. I did.
Those that do not know, pay for it.
Red Hat continues to distribute proprietary software like Red Hat Network Satellite to its customers.
This new CEO could prove his software freedom prowess by changing this situation.
Will he?