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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.
No, but he runs Red Hat now.
*ducks*
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
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?
No, actually it's the other way around, that's why all 3rd party RedHat/Fedora repositories have already switched to the yum format years ago.
"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.
I just wanted to know whether he'd switch Redhat to apt and .deb in the near future
Why would he do that? RPM has many more features, more of an industry standard, etc and yum has just as many features as apt including some apt doesn't have. There is a yum is faster and uses cache just like apt and even has plugins like fast mirror. A yum update takes me 3 seconds across several different repositories. like adobe, livna, updates and kernel mods so the speed is not a problem either like 90% of other distro users still believe.
I really hope that people get with the new decade and see RPM's are just fine since 10 years ago when you tried installing gimp.suse.rpm on a redhat box.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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.
Not that this guy would be unable to, but he probably has far better things to do with his time that cannot be done by others underneath him.
In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.
The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.
Since Redhat want to gain new customers they need to make their solutions look as familiar as possible to people coming from windows.
In regard to your point about apt I can really comment since I have never used it. The last time I used RPM though it put me off using Redhat for any of my own machines again so maybe you have a point.
I dont read
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 ]
You have it exactly backwards. GNOME's user interface has become more and more like Mac OS X in several important ways, like the file chooser dialog, spatial file manager, program menu at the top of the screen, etc. etc. while KDE emulates Windows in just about every way (except it adds a bunch of features Windows doesn't have).
And where on earth did you get the mistaken idea that KDE does not support Windows-style cut and paste? It always has.
No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.
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.
No, the real reason GNOME is dominant in business-oriented distributions is GTK's more liberal licensing: LGPL instead of Qt's GPL/commercial dual licensing. That means you can make a GTK/GNOME-based commercial, closed-source product without having to buy a license from the GUI toolkit's maker. With Qt and hence with KDE, that is not possible.
That is correct. However it isn't just commercial licenses that have a problem, it is any non-approved FOSS license. Trolltech accept quite a lot of them, but not all (witness recent GPL3 issues with Samba). Whereas GNOME sees the desktop as a foundation, just like the Linux kernel - you can run whatever you want on it. Only if you change the foundation do you need to comply with its license.The other important reason is that GNOME has a regular, consistent release schedule - every 6 months. KDE, on the other hand, is more erratic, and the KDE 4 switch is a good example. Ubuntu can't make its next KDE release a Long Term Service one, which would have 3 years of support, because KDE isn't allowing that: KDE 4 is too new, and KDE 3 won't be supported by KDE devs for long enough (they are all focusing on KDE 4 now, unsurprisingly).
Since both GTK/GNOME and Qt/KDE are excellent platforms, distros have a choice between them, and consequently all major ones have gone GNOME.
"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.