On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Audioslave - 7M3 - Live wrote: >The main reason that I assumed that the desktop market was something >that you were shooting at was the looks of RH 8. It has what most >desktop users need, available.
Different people have different ideas of what "desktop" means and what "desktop market" means. The home computer desktop is definitely not a Red Hat target market at this point in time, but that does not mean that we turn a blind eye either. We make many improvements to the OS that benefit users of various categories, however our prime business focuses are what pay our bills and allow us to come back again and again with new releases, and as such, we focus our engineering resources in those areas that give us the biggest bang for the buck. If we did not do this, we would be just another Linux upstart failure. I believe we must be doing something right to be the number one Linux vendor. Red Hat Linux 8.0 indeed has much more desktop savvy than did prior releases, there's no doubt in that. These changes definitely benefit users of the desktop across the board, from the high end workstation user, to the business desktop user, to the home user and the hobbiest. Red Hat Linux 9 continues this paradigm shift as well. Future releases of our OS products will most likely continue this even further. While these changes may make the OS attractive for some users across the board of different categories, not all of those "usage markets" are viable "business target markets" with which to turn a profit. Since there are finite engineering resources, we must concentrate those resources on the areas of the OS that bring the biggest bang for the buck. That allows us to keep existing customers and markets happy, while opening up new markets. As we are able to determine a market to be profitable, we will likely add more resources to develop software for that market based on customer feedback in the given market, and based on the amount of profit we visualize from that market. If we visualize nothing, then we are less likely to allocate a lot of resources to those areas. It's just simple good business sense. Gah... Now you people have me talking like a financial person. Make me puke. ;o) Perhaps the largest barrier that will face Linux on the home desktop, is that home desktop user's computers generally come with an operating system already, and it generally isn't Linux. They are much less likely to choose something like Linux en masse unless there are compelling reasons for them to do so. In their eyes, they're theoretically saying "what can you do for me Red Hat?", and people generally don't want to pay for their OS either, especially if one comes with their computer already (wether they've paid for it or not). In order for Red Hat to be answer their question, we have to ask "what are you willing to pay for us to provide you that". What you then have is somewhat of a catch-22 situation, but not entirely. What generally has happened in the evolution of Linux, and it's entrance to new markets - from a "company can actually turn a profit selling Linux in this market" viewpoint, has been basically more and more software becoming available for Linux and improving in quality, until people are literally knocking on the doors with huge fistfuls of dollars. When people come to the front with huge fistfuls of dollars, they help to drive future development, which in turn makes the software start to be viable for more and more businesses and people out there, whom then come forth with money, which then causes more software and features to be developed to meet the current paying userbase's needs/requests, and so goes the chain. The home user market isn't like that. I don't have any actual statistics, and am completely making guesses, but realistically speaking (IMHO), while there definitely are hobbiests out there, and other home users etc. who do purchase products and/or services, the number of people doing so again "in my own personal opinion" isn't large enough to solely drive the development. If there were a couple hundred thousand home users subscribing their shiny new copy of Red Hat Linux 9 to RHN in a week under the basic $60/year subscription, and indicating what they're using it for, then statistics could possibly be generated to make a business case. Perhaps this could be a survey done via RHN to find out? I'm not completely sure that people don't forge such surveys though so it is hard to collect hard data IMHO. >Also, the use of Linux within my personal work environment is very >limited. To my knowledge, it is only used for a few purposes. The >business model looks lesser than the desktop, to me. That's definitely not the norm. >I now see three markets. Server use, corporate use and home use. I think >that home use is higher than business use, excluding server use. "usage" and "profitability" are 2 different things. There can be 10 million people out there downloading Linux and using it, sharing it with friends, etc. but if those 10 million people, or some decent percentage of them aren't paying for the product or services (and by all means they certainly don't have to), then those users may find the OS popular, and may help to popularize it even, but they're not putting the money in to drive development. Development is driven largely by what features are required by paying customers. Generally, these features also are things that non-paying customers want too, and so everyone benefits. But if non-paying customers want features that a large amount of paying customers aren't asking for or demanding, it is hard to justify allocation of resources to doing such things instead of allocating those same resources to implement things that do increase the number of large paying customers. Again, it is simple business sense. Some people might think this way of thinking is "corporate ugly", and "not community spirit" or some other fanatical thing, but it is really very much the opposite. By focusing on implementing things that the benefit the largest number of paying customers, *everyone* including non-paying customers, and quite often even non-Red Hat Linux users end up benefiting from. For example, Red Hat has developed NPTL. NPTL isn't something that matters much to the home desktop user at all. It *does* however provide a feature that makes Linux very much more attractive to a lot more commercial companies, of whom will likely be planning migrating more and more of their systems to Linux now, and paying gobs of money to us. ;o) The community benefits also, as do any of our competitors who also use NPTL. It's a win win situation for everyone, however we do end up making money off of this because now many companies out there consider Linux one notch more viable for doing business. By continuing to implement features like this that cause more money to come in, we end up making Linux more and more accessible to more and more users out there across the board. I may be crazy, and by all means feel free to disagree with anything I'm saying. But I believe at some point, many of the things missing for "the home desktop" will be things that some company out there wants to have and is willing to tell us "if you implement foo, we will be interested in your product as a solution for our problem" They may even go as far as to directly pay us to do it. When that happens, more and more of the missing pieces of the desktop will start to fill in, and eventually we'll have ourselves in a much more viable situation for the home desktop. Then it's only a matter of visualizing a business case that is large enough to jump on Microsoft's toes with both feet. That is a tough order. >I do feeel that getting the schools to teach Linux and invest in >hardware, with the savings, will increase Linux adoption. I do >feel that a push to commercialize Linux too heavily will result >in a backwave for Linux to break into the market, as a feasable >alternative to proprietory software. Absolutely, and Red Hat is very involved in trying to do just that with our "Open Source Now!" initiative. >For adoption at our business. I was thinking about our division in >Norway. They currently use win2k professional for the OS. Older versions >sell with NT4. Ewww! ;o) >They want to check into using Linux, in order to reduce the price of >their product. I was going to try to push Red Hat. Now, I'm considering >checking out other distros, for their adoption. Definitely check out various solutions and choose the one that best meets your needs. >In short, the desktop market is probably more feasable now. >Mainly because of Windows discontinuing their support, for their >products. But with making RH more expensive, selling it, to >businesses, looks less likely. The adoption of more stringent >end of life cycles also is a crippling point, within Red Hat. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that none of our products/services and/or price points meet the needs of your particular problem domain. If that is the case, then make your situation known to Red Hat either via telephone or by emailing [EMAIL PROTECTED] and providing detailed feedback of your needs, and how our products meet or dont meet them. We'll hopefully receive enough of such feedback to see commonality between a large group of potentially paying customers that present a viable market with which to enter with new products and/or services and thus meet the emerging market's requirements. If not, then it's likely something that a large enough market doesn't exist yet, and which we'll not persue yet. In the mean time, users can try to fit one of our existing products and services to their needs while continuing to provide us with feedback, or they can explore alternative solutions to that which we provide. Customer feedback is indeed important to us, and helps as one piece of the puzzle to drive our direction. If we miss a viable market target, then either someone will step in and fill the gap on us, or we'll realize that there is a market we are missing out on that looks like a profitable venture, and we'll likely persue it, as we keep a close eye on these things. ;o) Ok, I promise... this is my last ultralong email for today. ;o) Take care! TTYL -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
