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Red Hat Set To Surpass Sun In Market Capitalization
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."
I for one hope that Sun not only survives, but prospers. Sun has greatly contributed over the years to the development community, particularly FOSS developers.
[Insert pithy quote here]
A thousand and one posts saying that it's illegal/immoral/impossible to make money from open source software will be along soon.
They'll be followed shortly after by sevaral thousand more complaining that all corporations are evil and should be banned.
In turn those will be followed by several million arguing that google are/aren't evil, or disputing the subtle nuances between doing evil and being evil.
In other words: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. The tuna salad is off, by the way.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...that marketing trumps technology. Sun has some incredible tech and even delivers x86 servers at highly competitive prices. Yet because Sun's marketing sucks worse than a black hole, generating new customers is a huge issue for them. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of their business is still through customer reps with little attention paid to the market as a whole.
I personally think that Sun could be successful in quite a few areas of the market. Not the least of which is as a serious competitor to Dell's server business. But first, Sun has to figure out how to communicate with the average customer. Giving their software complex prefixes like "Sun Java System", branding everything with "SPARC" even when it isn't SPARC, changing their market ticker to JAVA, and giving up on new markets before they've made inroads aren't exactly painting Sun in a positive light.
Dear Mr. Schwartz: Please hire a real marketing department and see to it that your product line makes sense to the average consumer. KTHXBYE.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I understand that. I was asking if looking at the market capitalization really said more about how the company was doing than its sales numbers? Do we now judge the success of tech companies by looking at what non-technical financial people think the company might be worth in the very short term?
Really, I think it says more of the "investors" that they think a company with sales of 700M a year should be worth (in market capitalization terms) the same or more than a company with sales of 13Billion a year.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
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?