




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."
Umm (Score:5, 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]).
How could they not be successful? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:And now, for the rest of the story... (Score:3, Interesting)
How about quotes from the same era about Linux on the desktop? Or quotes from every year since about how this year will be the long heralded Year Of Linux on the desktop?
It started as media hype but this is the era of mobile computing and I would say that Linux has done extremely well in that market. Apple is still #1, Android is #2 but Microsoft is 4th when there is a huge gap between 2nd and 3rd. Android is still a consolation prize until they can start running neck and neck with the iPad and when that happens, you'll have more PR hype asking "Is this the year the [mainstream] desktop dies?" It's all part of the plan for Linux world dominance. Bow down to your root overlords!
Interesting... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems totally unsurprising that much of the internet hosting going on today wouldn't even be economically possible if they were paying a tithe to Redmond, and it is similarly unsurprising that vendors of expensive applications would really rather that you pay for their software, not for the OS it happens to run on. Much more interesting that there is a place for Redhat in all this...
Re:Awesome.. but some perspective (Score:5, 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.
Re:And now, for the rest of the story... (Score:4, Interesting)
Niche market (Score:2, Interesting)
I've found completely different purposes for Windows and Linux environments most of the time, they solve different goals. I prefer IIS/MSSQL/Windows over most stuff in the enterprise but put in Linux when it fills a void in either licensing or application compatibility.
Re:More (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.