Matt Asay, who quit Novell recently, has written an opinion piece on the differences between Red Hat and Novell in the Linux industry. "Red Hat has long dominated the Linux market. In part this has resulted from serendipity - the company raised gobs of cash in a boom-time IPO and so was the first big player to market - but it also results from the company's rabid focus on customers. Importantly, Red Hat has never wavered from a core understanding that the low-hanging fruit is Unix."
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Member since:2005-10-19
"I wish Red Hat would push their desktop offering more vigorously as well (they offer it, with RHD), but with them it's really an afterthought."
Red Hat knows better than to push their desktop offering. They attempted this once at the retail level, and failed horribly.
This is the secret to the current success of Red Hat. They know where their market IS, rather than where they would like it to be.
Red Hat is more forthcoming than the others about allowing nature to take it course. For this reason they are willing to freely open source anything which might help the desktop Linux market, SOMEDAY.
Member since:I agree. Red Hat isn't trying to invent the Linux Desktop. They tried that already. They know where the money lies.
Novell is wasting time and money on their desktop focus. It is bad enough that they have gutted SuSE in order to create NLD. But to make matters worse, they have people on their staff getting paid to write desktop applications such as F-Spot, a photo app for God's sake. It's absolutely absurd. They drank the Ximian Koolaid.
Member since:
2005-07-12
From a business standpoint, most certainly the biggest area of profit, and future growth, is the server side, mostly with Unix to Linux conversions.
However, there is a good opportunity for Linux on the Desktop, especially in big business.
Being that most corporate applications these days are distributed with server side web apps (making what OS is on the client workstation irrelevant), and being that at least 90% of the Offic product market can do what they need with OpenOffice, Linux is a great fit on the corporate desktop in many cases.
The main thing is that it is easy to deploy, easy to administer, and is fairly light on resources (at least light enough to run well on legacy hardware).
The Novells and Linspires and Xandros' of the world have the opportunity to swoop in on shops that are at a crossroads of having to either upgrade to the latest in WinXP, or Vista, and can get a cheaper option through Linux while still using their legacy hardware (upgrading hardware to run Vista will be a huge expense, in many cases).
That said, Linux business desktop is not a huge market, but big enough potentially to make it worthwhile for Novell.
I wish Red Hat would push their desktop offering more vigorously as well (they offer it, with RHD), but with them it's really an afterthought. I don't blame them, since they are rolling in the money with their server offerings. But I think the desktop is a nice compliment to their server offerings, and help spur on more sales.