[CLUE-Talk] How many more times can RH shoot itself in the foot?

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 07:19:55 -0700
BOF <bof at pcisys.net> wrote:
> How many more times can RH shoot itself in the foot --- as it stands now 
> they must be using a high capacity magazine and be getting to reload.

You're assuming that Red Hat *wants* the low-end single-copy business, which probably isn't the case. Very little of RH's revenue is coming from their low-end products, which is why they scuttled them.

Besides -- the cost of RHPW is ~$99 -- that's still cheaper than their cheapest subscription to one of their "enterprise" products. (Yes, former RHN subscribers can sign up at $89 annually for two years, but then it shoots up to $189 per year or so if they keep to their listed pricing.) 

Over the past few years, RH has done just about everything it can to get out of the single-user Linux business -- it wants the enterprise customers who will pay for company-wide support, not the end users that want support for the latest version of 500+ different applications (XMMS, Mozilla, Evolution, OpenOffice.org, GNUmeric, etc.) and tend to be very vocal and demanding without being very profitable. The enterprise market isn't going to demand that RH package all the stuff that a lot of Linux users want -- they're going to want the basics, and that's about it. (At least, that's my take on it... I doubt many companies really want 100+ games or 5 different e-mail clients.) 

Whether this is a smart move remains to be seen, but I think they're deliberately making it unattractive for the low-end users so they can concentrate solely on the high-dollar stuff.

I'm curious to see how well Fedora does at meeting the needs of the former RHL users... I thought Fedora Core was okay, but I haven't actually been using it 24/7. 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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