Red Hat Bets Big On Cloud Target

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."

Re:Where's the money?

[RobBebop]

how do the expect to make revenue?

Benefits of specialization. As the bottom level of the "Cloud Infrastructure" Red Hat can service customers who actually own the clouds better (i.e. cheaper) than they can service themselves.

Sure, Amazon *could* retain an internal staff to manage the server bits, but it is easier from them to worry about their application software and share the cost of managing the clouds with Red Hat's other customers.

Of course, there eventually comes a point in time when it will be cheaper for Amazon to simply BUY Red Hat and then things will get real interesting.

Re:The height of irresponsibility

[hansraj]

I know this is slashdot but that is the single most ridiculous analogy I have ever seen in my life. Are you implying in any way that the possibility of P turning out to be same as NP or factorization being in P after all is the same as possibility of dragons existing?

While dragons are not proven to not exist, one can make reasonably good plausibility arguments about their non-existence depending on what characteristics your dragon has, whereas these big questions have no plausibility arguments for settling either way. But that is not even an issue here.

How many times does reality offer you a surprise? Not many I would guess. Mathematicians on the other hand frequently come up with very surprising results. And if you were basing your analogy on the assumption that there is a consensus about the status of these big problems, then you are mistaken.

Re:Where's the money?

[seifried]

If you are a technology company offering cloud computing than that is by definition your core competency, to completely outsource it is a pretty much guaranteed path to implosion, as there is no real point for your company existing. Look at what happened to manufacturing in America, it all went to China, and now the Chinese are figuring out they can make their own brand names (or simply buy American ones like Lenovo/Thinkpad) and cut out the middle man marketing/sales/etc and do it themselves.