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Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-that's-a-milestone dept.

mytrip writes "In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's."

4 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong. by AltGrendel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Definition - Market capitalization:
    an estimation of the value of a business that is obtained by multiplying the number of shares outstanding by the current price of a share

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    - Douglas Adams

    1. Re:Wrong. by Estanislao+Mart�nez · · Score: 5, Informative

      That is largely right, except for one detail: Red Hat is producing profits, but Sun recently posted a big loss, mostly due to a 1.45B impairment of goodwill charge. (In English: they revised their estimate of the value of some of the companies they've purchased, down 1.45B).

      To answer the original thread poster's question: it's not how much you sell, it's how much your keep.

      --

      Are you adequate?

    2. Re:Wrong. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's almost as silly as judging a company by it's gross sales.

      What you're looking for is PROFIT. Sun's profit was 88 million, or 11 cents per share in the last quarter (down 73%) while Red Hat's profit was 24 million, or 12 cents per share, up about 7%. Sun is forecasting that they will lose money over the next year, while Red Hat is forecasting (and analysts agree) that they will continue making money.

      Sun still made more money than Red Hat, but even Sun agrees that's going to change.

  2. Re:A relatively unimportant event by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I fail to see why this is a "deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems" and not merely a moderately interesting moment in the corporate history of the respective companies (or, more specifically, in Red Hat's corporate history).

    It's symbolic because Sun was one of the leaders of the big change that occurred at the beginning of the microcomputer era, when Unix started to replace the old mainframe OSs. And it's symbolic because Sun is the last major player to consider Unix part of its core strategy. Other Unix vendors have become insignificant (SGI, SCO), disappeared, or changed their emphasis to Linux and Windows (IBM, HP).

    Also, if you want to run a supported, commercial Unix on commodity hardware, Solaris is really your only option. Which is why both HP and Dell offer Solaris preinstalled. Though I don't suppose they sell a lot of those systems.

    As a benchmark of the rise of Linux and the fall of Unix, yeah, it's not that big a deal. But symbols and benchmarks are different things.

    This may all be a big yawn to somebody whose career started after Linux began to take over. But to those of us who spent most of our professional lives working with Unix (I started in the early 70s, before Unix was even available commercially; I've worked for 5 different Unix vendors, including Sun) it's as big a symbol as the takeoff of a certain helicopter on Tuesday.