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."

Comments

Focusing on core business...

[NerveGas]

    Isn't their core business providing SRPMS to CentOS?

Re:Same Old, Same Old

[Skyshadow]

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.

Re:it still comes down to software.

[alexborges]

Gosh, what is it with people that think linux needs this or that to "survive". Linux is by far the most ported OS of all time, it works everywere in embeded devices, probably in your wifi router, probably in your home isdn/cable/ADSL router.

It powers google, a good chunk of yahoo and im pretty sure some good part of the online infrastructure at microsoft, ibm, hp and many other non-it related companies.

Linux is NEVER going to die, with or without adobe on board. Adobe is not porting due to they feeling its not worth it. But FOSS may very well give them a run for their money. Weve done it before, we will do it again and, when the time comes that Adobe sees a market for linux, they may very well end up being the underdog in our ecosystem due to them not starting to compete earlyer with equivalent foss solutions.

Now. Is Linux going to Conquer The World? I dunno. I hope it does.

Re:CentOS

[DamnStupidElf]

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.

Wallet vote

[DrYak]

His refusal to buy iPod has also to do with that stuff called "vote-with-your-wallet" that /.ers are often talking about.

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. ...On the other hand, at least the iPod isn't some PlaysForSure crap...