In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue 227
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."
Good for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Redhat contributes a TON to open source projects, and a lot of the time I find their online documentation to be the best available. I am very glad they're doing well.
Perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And now, for the rest of the story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Linux (lowercase l), and RedHat does good things - worthy of being a going-growing concern. "Winning the war", they are not.
Red Hat has a poster in almost every office quoting Ghandi:
First they ignore You
Then they laugh at you
They they fight you
Then you win.
That quote permeates most of Red Hat Culture.
Re:Awesome.. but some perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
And I assume by posting that, you didn't know that IBM is 47% larger (by revenue) than Microsoft?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=IBM+Key+Statistics [yahoo.com]
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft [yahoo.com]
Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of MS (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things:
>> "'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."
#1: That wasn't a "prediction." That was a positioning statement, meant for the ears of commercial buyers and software channels, that Microsoft will remove its good graces from anyone who tries to interfere with Microsoft's business operating system sales.
#2: Microsoft revenues in Q1 2012 were $20B, or about 60 times Red Hat's. If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)
Re:Not a Gates "prediction", still only 1% size of (Score:5, Insightful)
If anything, Microsoft is probably thrilled to have a relatively tiny, but still growing competitor in the market to keep the anti-trust folks at bay. (Remember those guys from about 10 years ago?)
No. They are not. Because that $1 Billion revenue of RedHat's represents Hundreds of Billions of dollars of lost revenue to Microsoft. Every server running Linux is a server that MIGHT have a Windows license if free offerings such as Linux weren't so capable.
Without RedHat and other tiddling (compared to Microsoft) companies improving Linux every day, Microsoft would be the highest revenue company in the world and their stock would still be increasing in value.
Strategic Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
That quote sounds more like Strategic FUD. It doesn't take a genius to realize that when students and enthusiasts are, in large numbers, rallying to a competing operating system, you've got some future trouble heading your way.
As the CEO of a large company, you're not going to say anything to try to *encourage* people to look at the competition, so you demean and minimize it.
Re:Let's hear it for the 1%ers! (Score:4, Insightful)
That quote permeates most of Red Hat Culture.
Know what else permeates most of Red Hat culture? Reality. They realized years ago that making it easy for people to get your product for free isn't going to make you much money. Thus, no binaries for non-paying customers. You've gotta be willing to compile everything from source yourself. We're making a big deal about a "billion dollar open source company" here, when Red Hat doesn't operate like an "open source" company. They're making money precisely because they operate as close to a proprietary company as possible without violating the GPL. Giving your product away, ready made, is folly if you actually want to make big money (unless you can make money by advertising, a'la Google and Facebook... but operating systems don't work that way).
How many other billion dollar open source companies are there?
Re:Red Hat? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's back when it was a different world, there were no (very few) hard drives, no (very few) "laptops", no smartphones, no (well, almost no) internet, and very few people owned a PC. Reaching a billion considering all those factors against them is amazing.
Do you mean "back when it was easy to start a monopoly"?