• home
  • activity stream
  • contact
Home › Blogs › Markus Thielmann's blog

Red Hat chickens out of attacking Microsoft on the desktop market

Markus Thielmann — Thu, 2008-04-17

The Red Hat Desktop Team announced Wednesday:

we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. [...]
as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. [...]
Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.

I guess by "charities" they're referring to the Ubuntu Foundation.

Since Red Hat is one of the leading distributors and open source developers, I'm quite unsatisfied with it's attitude towards Canonicals business model and Ubuntu's success story.

Ubuntu was a huge success because Shuttleworth decided to charge for support and service. Red Hat still charges for software updates on their Enterprise Distributions.

With Fedora, Red Hat patronizes a great and free distribution. Instead of adopting Canonicals business model and strengthen Fedoras support, Red Hat clarifies, that they do not formally support Fedora, but users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.

Dell's (and others) decision on Ubuntu as it's preferred Distribution on Desktops already proves how Canonical and Ubuntu outruns the old "majors".

Better Software? Maybe.
Better business model? For sure.

I'm quite confident that Red Hat will reconsider it's statement in a foreseeable future.

  • Linux
  • Microsoft
  • Red Hat
  • Ubuntu
  • UbuntuWeblogs
  • Markus Thielmann's blog

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Input format
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • You may post code using <code>...</code> (generic) or <?php ... ?> (highlighted PHP) tags.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You can use Mediawiki syntax. It is possible that not all formatting options are supported at the moment.
    Links to other pages: [[Page Title]] or [[path/to/page|Title]].
    External links: http://example.com or [http://example.com some link title].
    Interwiki links: [[site:Page Title]].
    You can use the following interwiki links: path, gdo, wp
    Images are included with [[Image:name]]. (wikipedia help)

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Syndicate content

Markus Thielmann is a Berlin based open source enthusiast and developer. Read more...

Portrait

Tags in Tags

Commercial Firefox Flash Fun Google Marketing Microsoft Music Open Source Ubuntu UbuntuWeblogs Unbelievable
more tags

  • home
  • activity stream
  • contact