Think Twice, Red Hat
by Andy Oram
Jan. 19, 2002
The news reports today say that Red Hat may be bought by AOL
Time Warner, just as several years
ago AOL bought Netscape. The analogy I'm making between Red
Hat and Netscape is not a casual
one; the history of AOL acquisitions shows that the two sides
should be exceeding cautious about this
odd lash-up.
About nine years ago, O'Reilly & Associates sold a service to
AOL (before it caught the slightly
bigger prize of Time Warner.) AOL management clearly
impressed our negotiators as savvy
go-getters; their success in recognizing the Internet's
importance and leveraging the Internet to sell their
own service was just one piece of evidence. Yet a year after
we sold Global Network Navigator to
them, it was dead.
I don't really blame AOL for giving up on GNN (and it would
be ungrateful to do so, because they
tendered O'Reilly & Associates a nicely sized payment and
continued to contract with us to provide
them with content for some time). After all, we sold GNN
because we couldn't make a go of it
ourselves. As the first Web site with original edited
content, and the first to sell ads, it broke ground in
too many new ways, and to fill the holes it created would
require huge sums of money. AOL certainly
poured in the money, and worked hard to revamp GNN's concept
and look. They also marketed
GNN the way they marketed themselves; scattering free disks
like barley seeds in every available
furrow. Still, the incident shows that AOL can't necessarily
make a success out of new properties.
Netscape is even an bigger red flag for Red Hat. I couldn't
find anyone at the time of the AOL
purchase that could find a good reason for it. Apparently,
AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape
home page, which most Netscape users left as their default
when starting up their browser.
That's about the flimsiest grounds I can think of for
purchasing a whole company--along with the
commitment to maintain and enhance its products. AOL hasn't
learned the lesson (which the United
States government also needs to learn) that hegemony doesn't
win the prize in today's multifaceted
world.
As with GNN, I feel grateful to AOL for trying to save
Netscape. But AOL management failed to
pick up the Netscape management's vision, and failed to offer
an alternative vision of their own. They
could still surprise us, but I think the suspense has gone on
too long for a proper plot turn.
AOL bought CompuServe in 1998 and apparently has kept it
successful, but so far as I've heard, it's
not trying to make an impact on the world or try anything
innovative.
Finally, of course, AOL merged with Time Warner. According to
news reports, this venture also is
stagnating. Connectivity and content don't seem to be as
synergistic as all the large corporations think
they are. And that's a good thing, because the carrier and
the message should be under separate
control.
Now, I can see what would attract Red Hat and AOL to each
other. In addition to their common
corporate enemy, they both recognize that Linux has a place
in large corporations. Red Hat has
already done about as much as anybody to legitimize and
mainstream Linux; I imagine their vision can
fit with the AOL world view.
So what should Red Hat look out for?
First, as GNN showed, an influx of cash is not guarantee of
success.
Second, as Netscape has showed (so far), a business plan that
calls for fast world domination is not a
good match for a technological plan that involves a lot of
experimentation and careful evolution.
Most important, Red Hat should worry about the conditions
imposed on new technology by AOL and
Time Warner. Will they want a Red Hat distribution to include
copy controls? (I'm not sure how that
could be layered on a free operating system, but Red Hat
could die trying.) Will they expend too many
resources trying to attack the Windows monopoly head on,
rather than playing on Linux's unique
strengths (and the ones it inherited from Unix) as a
multi-user system, a server well-tuned for open
Internet protocols, etc.?
I just think that Linux has more places to go than most of us
now imagine. An independent and
quick-thinking Red Hat will be free to go those places as
well. I think some of those directions will not
be where AOL or Time Warner want to go. If Red Hat is the one
to suffer, I don't want the rest of the
Linux community to suffer too.
Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates specializing
in books on Linux and
programming. Most recently, he edited Peer-to-Peer:
Harnessing the Power of Disruptive
Technologies.
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