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In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue

Posted by timothy on from the flash-in-the-pan-I-tell-you dept.

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."

5 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Umm by Psychotria · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To a large extent, Red Hat is cashing in on a much broader community effort that has developed Linux and sold it as a viable platform to software developers, says George Weiss, an analyst with the Gartner technology research firm. But Red had a hand in this. “Give credit to Red Hat for fashioning a business model that created value from subscription support,” he adds.

    Emphasis mine. I don't think that the success of Red Hat depended on Linux being a viable platform for software developers. Rather, it depended on Linux being a viable platform for servers (I'm not meaning to under-emphasise the desktop users, or the developers, here; all I'm trying to say is that the success of Red Hat probably has little to do with Linux being "developer friendly" and more to do with the server market [and all that entails]).

  2. How could they not be successful? by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm a developer (on RHEL 5/6) in a company on the same size order as MS that deploys RH or the CentOS derivative on the high tens-of-thousands of nodes scale.

    Congratulations and all, but how could you not be successful when providing such a superior product to your competition. RHEL beats MS server variants in every way for ease of development (integrating dozens of nodes is a breeze, IA is consistent and well documented), cost, features, and support (we can call up RHEL developers at any time to request they investigate problems and push out fixes on timely schedules).

    They are a great company, and don't make you feel dirty for using their product.

    --
    while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
  3. Re:Awesome.. but some perspective by rgbrenner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If Microsoft stopped growing today.. and RH kept growing at the rate they did last year (23% revenue growth)... it will be 21 years before they reach Microsoft's size.

    I wouldn't call that "little"... 20 years is an eternity in software.

  4. Re:And now, for the rest of the story... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Android is #1, iOS is #2. You have to be very careful of weasel words from Apple supporters: they'll make claims like "Apple is the largest single mobile vendor!", but of course all of the Android vendors put together still outnumber Apple. So Android market share is larger than iOS.

  5. Re:More by Red+Storm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While technically true, this argument does fall apart when a company such as Oracle rebrands RHEL into OEL, then goes on the offensive against RHEL/Red Hat when they don't have much of a team of developers to continue developing OEL should the hypothetical, but very unlikely, situation of Red Hat going away. In a situation such as that it's kind of like Oracle is biting the hand that feeds it.... CentOS on the other hand rebrands RHEL, but does not try to present themselves as the main proprietor of the distribution. In addition the CentOS community does try to push bug reports upstream when possible.

    --
    ---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....