It took me a long time to settle in on one Linux distribution, but Red Hat is it for me. I really feel as though I can trust the company to innovate and deliver products that are aligned with my long-term objectives.
innovate and deliver products that are aligned with my long-term objectives
I'm tempted to simply make a joke about whether Red Hat also leverages your synergies and upscales your key metrics -- but I'll ask the question: what does that mean?
Can you give me an example of what you're talking about? (Vis-a-vis another distro?)
good to see RH being profitable. They put a lot back into the open-source technologies that are the foundation of their business, much more than many other modern tech companies, ahem facebook, amazon whose contributions are relatively small compared to their huge profits
The question is, does Redhat have a repeatable business model, or is it a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?
I think the question is more: is there room for more than one RedHat?
They're by far the biggest and most notable "Linux company", and all the other companies like them have had a way of either getting bought to become a mere division of a corporate giant (like SuSE to Novell), or else losing money until they become irrelevant. It's important to have at least one or two corporate sponsors of Linux that won't "sell out" or screw the community in favor of their proprietary offerings.
If Canonical can get to where they are comfortably profitable and growing for two or three years, then I think we can say that RedHat's repeatable, but until then we'll only have the one example of a sustainable and successful independent Linux company.
it's not an easy thing to repeat. people buy from redhat because redhat has a long history of being very reliable, and they also employ some of the best linux hackers in the world. your startup can't compete with redhat's 20 year rock solid history. your startup can't hire away famous kernel hackers. redhat is also very good at what they do, so most of their customers are happy and not actively looking for an alternative.
Definitely, credit to the way redhat has executed. Kudos to the team.
But I guess the "Can't do", "Can't compete" has been said many times over in several cases and proven wrong. Its only a question of time before a determined team proves it all wrong. :)
Are most major companies something that have a repeatable business model or are they a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?
Would you want for your own company a repeatable business model or to be in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?
Could you even make a repeatable business model without a combination of being in the right place at the right time, with very good execution?
Fair enough, I'll clarify: When I say repeatable business model, I mean something like selling physical products online(amazon, zappos), selling physical hardware (IBM, HP), , selling enterprise software (oracle, SAP), or selling SAAS subscriptions (SalesForce, ec2).
Is giving away a 'community edition' of software and selling an enterprise licensed one repeatable to other types of software, or is it a unique case where Linux became The other server operating system, and they were both lucky and skilled enough to become the number one provider of linux.
Is giving away a 'community edition' of software and selling an enterprise licensed one repeatable to other types of software, or is it a unique case where Linux became The other server operating system, and they were both lucky and skilled enough to become the number one provider of linux.
There are a lot of other companies doing this, or something very much like it. Some of them have been around for a while, but I don't know any details of how profitable they are (or aren't).
I do know I'm taking a stab at doing this model myself, so I'll let ya know how it works out in a couple of years. :-)
Personally I think its all about execution, and yes if someone can execute well. Canonical comes to mind. There is a significant barrier to entry in terms of the 'scale' of the product though. MySql made sense, sendmail less so.
Thank you, Red Hat.