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In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue
head_dunce writes "Now that Red Hat has officially posted more than a billion dollars in revenue, ($1.13 billion to be exact), the company's PR department sent this funny list of quotes predicting doom. For instance, 'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."
Perhaps there is a billion dollars worth of revenue from the hobbyist and Student Market?
What Red Hat did which was shift away from trying to compete on the Desktop Market (Microsoft bread and butter) and focus more on the Server Market where Microsoft while a major player has more of an equal footing. Where they had a lot of legacy Unix shops that wanted to get off Unix Platforms but still keep the Unixy goodness.
In general most Novel Shops went to Windows, most Unix Shops went to Linux. By "most" meaning there are exceptions, and plenty of anecdotal stories. As moving to the other platform was much easier for the company.
For new companies. They would split across Microsoft and Linux (With Red Hat offering enterprise level support) Some would go with Microsoft and Other with Linux...
So in a competive market I am not supprised that Red Hat made money. They played smart business and they made money.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why do they need to "win the war"? We don't need software monoculture. We need interoperability. Redhat is successful and doing well in a market where others are also doing well.