Interview with Red Hat's New CEO 129
mjasay writes "Red Hat just got a new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, but based on a recent CNET interview with him, he's cut from the same cloth as Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's former CEO. He won't buy an iPod because it won't play Ogg Vorbis files. He refused other CEO roles because he 'must have a mission.' He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business. And he believes Red Hat should be doing $5 billion, not $500 million. It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses, according to Whitehurst."
Re:what player plays ogg files? (Score:3, Insightful)
Great News! (Score:4, Insightful)
Great News! I hope this guy does as much as he speaks!
Red Hat is a great company, has very good products, but still has to enhance its support. Also, with Ubuntu getting market share on desktops, and SuSE trying to grab some piece of the servers pie (although I don't think they will after the Microsoft deal), Red Hat needs someone like him to lead it so that it keeps its leadership.
I wish well to Mr. Whitehurst and sincerelly hope he can make Red Hat grow as much as he plans to!
Re:Same Old, Same Old (Score:5, Insightful)
SGI had some pretty kick-ass server gear and had just purchased Cray, so naturally they responsed by coming up with a half-ass NT desktop that, likewise, nobody wanted. They played to their weakness rather than their strength, and the result was that they lost bigtime.
This strikes me as being similar: They're playing to their weakness, trying to get to where everyone else is doing well and not realizing that (a) the space is already fairly saturated and (b) the competitors waiting for them there are better than they are at the sort of thing they do.
And who gives a shit if he's a OSS zealot? The way to help out our common interest here is to succeed -- I don't care if the guy will only listen to 8-tracks, I want to hear his plan for turning the company around. This isn't like an airline where your ass can be bailed out by the cyclical nature of the business -- while people always need an airplane to get someplace, in the end they really don't need your distro. You can't just keep flying and charge $5 for snack boxes.
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is "News For Nerds" to you, then you've been living under a rock for the last 30+ years...
He's got his corporate speak mixed up (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's a question of operational excellence and on focusing on its core businesses" - whoops, looks like his corporate speak backing statement is talking about cutting costs, not top line growth. You can make a company more profitable with these tasks, but it doesn't outline how you're going to make more money.
Re:He's got his corporate speak mixed up (Score:5, Insightful)
RH will have to grow and improve its support as well as enlarging their product portfolio. Generic Linux Service growth will IMHO not get them much beyond the $1B mark.
I can only hope that the new CEO can fix the issues with JBOSS and that the lessons learned here can be taken forward so that future purchases don't suffer the same problems.
The thing about(IMHO) RH is that they really don't do the self promotion thing very well especially when compared to others in the Linux business.
Re:it still comes down to software. (Score:5, Insightful)
It powers google, a good chunk of yahoo and im pretty sure some good part of the online infrastructure at microsoft, ibm, hp and many other non-it related companies.
Linux is NEVER going to die, with or without adobe on board. Adobe is not porting due to they feeling its not worth it. But FOSS may very well give them a run for their money. Weve done it before, we will do it again and, when the time comes that Adobe sees a market for linux, they may very well end up being the underdog in our ecosystem due to them not starting to compete earlyer with equivalent foss solutions.
Now. Is Linux going to Conquer The World? I dunno. I hope it does.
Re:A question for the CEO... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that this guy would be unable to, but he probably has far better things to do with his time that cannot be done by others underneath him.
In response to your comment about KDE there is a very good reason that RedHat use Gnome by default (IMHO): It is more like windows.
The problem with KDE is that the people who design the interface refuse to acknowledge that Windows is what everyone is used to and you need to make the transition away from that as easy as possible. Gnome has certain key features (like cut and paste) that are as close to the windows functionality as possible.
Since Redhat want to gain new customers they need to make their solutions look as familiar as possible to people coming from windows.
In regard to your point about apt I can really comment since I have never used it. The last time I used RPM though it put me off using Redhat for any of my own machines again so maybe you have a point.
Jboss is insanely over priced. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll stick with the unsupported free version, thanks. I just can't see getting $2000/year value for just some extra support I'll likely never use anyway.
Re:ogg on ipod indeed possible! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:CentOS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a contribution to Redhat. When people who've been using CentOS at home or for development want support at work, which distro do you think they'll buy support for? It's also a contribution to the community, because they explicitly make sure all the GPL code stays available and compilable. I wouldn't doubt if they find and report (and probably fix) bugs as well.
Re:it still comes down to software. (Score:4, Insightful)
"He suggests that taking proprietary shortcuts is a fundamentally wrong way to build a software business."
Its not likely that people are going to switch to linux because one popular proprietary application runs on linux, OSX, and Windows. They'll likely take the easiest route and stick with the status quo and purchase the Adobe software to run on their existing Windows/OSX box. Which means the effort required to get Adobe to port their apps to linux is pointless. If anything its a benefit to Adobe to port their apps if they want to sell them to people like me who are currently outside of their market possibilities because I refuse to run Windows or OSX, I use linux for my desktop.
I take his stance to be that if the open source apps on linux are not good enough then the correct solution is to put effort into the linux alternative apps, not take a short cut and try to get a proprietary vendor to port their closed source proprietary apps.
And given that the effort to do it the right way will be more difficult than giving in to short cuts, the pay offs would be bigger as well. If Red Hat can undercut the cost of a Windows/OSX system and Adobe apps for a development workstation by utilizing 100% non-proprietary open source applications then they will have a compelling reason for people to switch and consider Red Hat subscription services to support their platform choice.
Undercutting the massive profit margins on proprietary software is far more compelling than giving in to the same.
Wallet vote (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, by buy an iPod and replacing the firmware with Rockbox he *could* get OGG/Vorbis to play on his iPod.
*BUT*, by doing so, he would be giving money and thus encouraging a company that refuses to support OGG/Vorbis out of the box and that is known to actively discorage homebrew hacking of their hardware (see iPhone).
He would be better giving his money to a company that does openly support OGG/Vorbis (Samsung or the countless no-name asian USB stick/media players) or at least a company that publicly encourage 3rd party developers and 3rd party media codecs.
Re:core business (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what player plays ogg files? (Score:4, Insightful)
All Cowon players support Ogg out of the box (as well as just about every single other audio and video format). They actually have a really nice line-up all around; some of the best sound quality you will find in portables, too.
Now if only they hadn't crippled the A3 with that "you've-got-to-be-joking" battery life...
Blah, blah, blah? (Score:3, Insightful)
from Can an airline exec run Red Hat? You'd be surprised [zdnet.com]
As we went through the recruiting process, we did interview a number of people that I am sure are familiar to this audience listening from the technology industry and what we encountered, of course, was in many cases a lack of understanding of open source software development, a lack of understanding of our model. And as importantly for me, the open mindedness that would come to both the creation of new economic models and contemporary thinking as it relates to software development.
In my first meeting with Jim Whitehurst, we discussed the four Linux distributions that he was running on his home personal network. He was running Fedora Core 6 and Fedora Core 7 at home. He was running Slackware at home and he was an experienced software developer up until the time that he was at BCG (Boston Consulting Group). So we are getting a technically savvy executive who happens to have strong operational, financial, and strategic skills and it was in my view that in comparison to his peers that were finalists for the job, that he stood head and shoulders above, in light of all of the qualities that we were looking for in my successor.
Re:it still comes down to software. (Score:3, Insightful)
You must be new here.
Re:tick tock! (Score:2, Insightful)