back to article Ex-Microsoft man takes up arms for Red Hat's open-cloud crusade

“We want to be the undisputed leader in enterprise cloud,” Red Hat’s chief executive Jim Whitehurst said recently. It’s a big target to set yourself. There’s plenty of competition from incumbents such as Microsoft (now changing its game), and new entrants such as Amazon (breaking down the doors). One thing both have to help …

  1. boatsman
    Mushroom

    more talk, less code

    Apparently, RedHat is more and more becoming a PR machine.

    Somewhere 3 years ago they already spend 4x more dollars on PR than on R&D. (SEC filling, find it yourself if you must :-) )

    coffeemugs, t-shirts, talented PR people.

    it works, as we can see. RedHat is becoming a kind of drop-in replacement for Solaris / HP-UX.

    here is the catch.

    RHEL is a drop-in replacement, yes. but not technology-wise.

    RedHat's subscription business model is a drop-in replacement for the old generation of CIO's, who want to have a sales-rep to yell at and to blame when their shop goes titsup.... A billion dollar company, "how could I have known it was not good at <....> ? " is a very good blame-catcher.

    It takes a lot more guts to go opensource all the way. running a very expensive proprietary database on a very expensive linux is not much different from what it has replaced........... you won't get fired for that if it goes awry.........

    BM

    1. bri

      @boatsman: Re: more talk, less code

      The problem is that (broadly speaking) opensource is better for developers and service providers as they have no upfront costs, but it doesn't directly benefit end user that much (it does, but indirectly in other fields through new services etc.). The only thing it brings to the table, is more choice. Which is good and dandy until you have thousands of things to choose from, which bewilders CIO and normal user alike. You need aggregators who package that choice. You need such Red Hats.

      When you have an unruly heap of OSS offerings with all manner of strings attached (projects for fun without any semblance of longterm sustainability etc.) and two, three nicely wrapped-up commercial ones, it is no contest. Pure free as a freeedom as well as beer OSS loses. Marketing, packaging and support simplicity is hugely important. And engineers totally s*ck at marketing. They need marketers and sales people to keep them employed. So it is just natural that Red Hat, whose success stems from old fashioned marketing and sales and a small number of packaging and engineering ideas, has such ratios of marketing and engineering personnel. Marketing and sales are mission critical for them. Engineers are 'only' very important.

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