On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 23:37, Serge Pluess wrote: > One day one lonely box of > 8.2 was sitting at Fry's next to lots and lots of boxes of Redhat 9, > Suse 8.2, and current versions of Lycoris, Lindows, FreeBSD and > NetBSD. Redhat and Suse boxes are usually at the store the day of the > official release. And the store said that it doesn't have any > preferences, just that they never received any 9.0 nor 9.1 retail > boxes, otherwise they would put them on the shelves immediately.
Red Hat have just eliminated themselves from this race. They've figured out that the money lies in enterprise and corporate installation and support. No more Red Hat boxes on the shelf.
Cheers; Leon
Yes, but due to their long lasting presence in the stores plus the media attention they have build themselves enough name recognition to probably be able to pull this off.
If you go on the street here and you ask people they will have heard of RedHat and probably even seen the box in the stores. Two IT directors I know tried Linux because they saw the boxes at Fry's and bought a pack. What was it? Both went for Redhat and one additionally bought a copy of Xandros.
If you ask the same people about Mandrake, most of the times they have never heard that name.
Like Austin said, people here are impulse buyer when they see it in the store and if Mandrake wants to be a bigger player in the US it needs that presence to build up their name recognition.
I understand that the immediate payoff for Mandrake is less but in the longterm it will just be beneficial. Even SUSE as a German company realized that and managed to get themselves known here thanks mostly to the boxed sets, not even providing a free ISO to download.
Also for the enterprise, deals such as the ones between Oracle and Redhat and Suse are necessary to build credibility as a serious platform.
Thanks
Serge
