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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:~#
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.
I worked for SGI when I was an intern. This was back when they were realizing that nobody wanted to pay $20k for a workstation anymore.
SGI had some pretty kick-ass server gear and had just purchased Cray, so naturally they responsed by coming up with a half-ass NT desktop that, likewise, nobody wanted. They played to their weakness rather than their strength, and the result was that they lost bigtime.
This strikes me as being similar: They're playing to their weakness, trying to get to where everyone else is doing well and not realizing that (a) the space is already fairly saturated and (b) the competitors waiting for them there are better than they are at the sort of thing they do.
And who gives a shit if he's a OSS zealot? The way to help out our common interest here is to succeed -- I don't care if the guy will only listen to 8-tracks, I want to hear his plan for turning the company around. This isn't like an airline where your ass can be bailed out by the cyclical nature of the business -- while people always need an airplane to get someplace, in the end they really don't need your distro. You can't just keep flying and charge $5 for snack boxes.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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.
Ehem.... Contributions? Care to name a few of those?
I love CentOS as much as the next guy, but lets face it, their job is to compile srpms giving a clone of RHEL. They do it well, but thats hardly a "contribution" to anything.
NO SIG
What exactly is it they need to *turn around*. You say that like they're a failing company... Last I checked, profits were up 12% last quarter. Hardly a sinking ship...
I guess it was a case of bad wording. However, Whitehurst said himself that JBoss can do much, much better. $500M is largely based on core product (RHEL subscriptions), while $5B might be achievable through sales of stuff that goes on top of the OS.
I am also sure that they could do really well in a desktop market, if only they wanted to. That would bring a whole hip of complexity to the way Red Hat does business (and development) but I'm now certain that underlying technology is finally in a good shape to start something like this.
Agreed. Leaching is a one-way street.
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
I love CentOS as much as the next guy, but lets face it, their job is to compile srpms giving a clone of RHEL. They do it well, but thats hardly a "contribution" to anything.
It's a contribution to Redhat. When people who've been using CentOS at home or for development want support at work, which distro do you think they'll buy support for? It's also a contribution to the community, because they explicitly make sure all the GPL code stays available and compilable. I wouldn't doubt if they find and report (and probably fix) bugs as well.
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 ]
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.
It's called a "Business Decision". If all the half-baked servers now running CentOS had been running Red Hat, that could have a negative impact on their image, and thus, their sales. OTOH, if you're paying through the nose for your RH license, you're gonna make damned sure that that money isn't wasted.
For most needs, CentOS or Fedora should be fine.
Come back in a decade and tell me how Ubuntu's growth compares to Red Hat's. Marketing campaigns don't butter the bread.
The CentOS people have added some RPM's in their centosplus repository with newer version of some of the popular software on it. For CentOS 4, they have PHP 5.1, PostgreSQL 8.1, MySQL 5, and some kernels with support for other file systems (like XFS/ReiserFS I think, though I've not used them). RHEL 4 comes with PHP and MySQL 4.something, and PostgreSQL 7. That makes it easier for people running CentOS (or RHEL - though RedHat obviously wouldn't support it) to run more modern versions of a few popular applications. Its not exactly a cure for cancer type contribution, but it is certainly helpful to many people (including myself).
Here's a link: http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/i386/RPMS/
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.
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.
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.
Agreed - I run CentOS everywhere on my personal and non-production work stuff. Part of corporate policy for putting servers on our production floor, however, is that the OS must have a support contract. (Don't debate the wisdom of the policy - I think it's pretty bogus in a lot of cases, too, but there's no way around it - I've tried.) Gee, who am I going to pick? In the next six months, my group alone will spend some $12k with RH for support services.
Plus, all of the CentOS users running on such a wide variety of hardware only speeds up the bug-finding process.
actually, you don't want to change the rpm, you want to have better tools around it - which is exactly the direction that is taking place.
suse broke things some time ago heavily, then somewhat fixed it with their new zypper libs.
redhat is improving things with yum.
and then there are other package managers that do quite a good job - for example, smart.
Rich
"popular distros are Debian based"
.deb, rpm (the command) is comparable with dpkg, apt would be comparable with yum or up2date or something. rpm is a package format and its tool, apt is a highlevel package management system (which, iirc, can also handle rpms...).
That's a rather debatable statement.
"Apt just plain works better than rpm"
To make a car analogy, that's like saying buses work much better than people.
rpm (the file format) is comparable with
"A year or so ago, RH promised to fix rpm to make it as useful as apt."
Eh, IIRC, they promised to fix rpm. Which had some flaws (of mostly estoteric nature, which usually werent the actual problem users ran into).
The main issue has been getting redhat and fedora tracked into yum, yum improved and the gui tools polished. Personally I think they're on the right track and getting much closer; yum is getting pleasant to use (and dependency handling is getting exemplary if you install and activate yum-priorities and set your repo priorities (I'd really suggest they install and use it by default, it would prevent users shooting themselves in the foot unless they force the issue and increase the prio of a third party repo))
There are still speed issues (altho they've vastly improved recently), but as far as I can tell they're mostly due to erring on the side of caution ensuring that repo updates wont have broken the local picture of the current situation. I can appreciate that.
"There's a reason why the popular distros are Debian based."
Like Red Hat, Fedora or SUSE you mean, don't you?
"Apt just plain works better than rpm"
Here you show your craptacular ignorance regarding what are you talking about. Therefore everything else you say is moot and completely disposable.
Just for your leisure:
Apt and rpm are *NOT* comparable. Dpkg and rpm are.
Now, since neither rpm nor dpkg are there to deal with package dependency download/resolution can you please tell us what the hell are you talking about? Can you please tell us what are the tremendous differences between dpkg and rpm (the package managers) or between deb and rpm (the package formats) that should make us clearly prefer one over the other?
"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
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.