Red Hat can learn from Milkha Singh

Sam Varghese
Friday, 11 May 2007 08:41

Opinion and Analysis

But now, some foolishness appears to be manifesting itself. Once again, Red Hat is making an effort to be all things to all people and this will end up in the dust.

Red Hat has consolidated its position as a provider of server software for the business sector. It has also made fairly decent mileage with its business desktop software. The growth in these areas came after a period when the company seemingly could not decide whether it should try and cater to the desktop market at large or not.

Now an element of confusion appears to have crept in again. Apparently distracted by Canonical (Ubuntu) and Novell (SUSE Linux), both of which will be sold by Dell, Red Hat now wants to push its business desktop into the consumer market - with a different brand and a few tweaks here and there.

With this, it would be venturing into a market which it once tried to enter and gave up. In 2002, Red Hat came out with a desktop environment which it called Blue Curve, a desktop that combined elements of both GNOME and KDE (though GNOME was clearly dominant). Developers from both projects were annoyed and one KDE developer who worked for Red Hat at the time resigned from the company in protest. The users at large weren't overly enthusiastic either.

The following year, Red Hat announced the start of the Fedora project - and a community distribution called Fedora Core which would be free for all to download and use. This distribution has helped build a following among non-business users - the enthusiasts and home users.

The strategy of concentrating on the server market, selling desktop software to business users and keeping the community happy with Fedora Core has served Red Hat extremely well over the last three years or so. The Red Hat brand has good vibes and not in the US alone. Why any company would not want to consolidate in these areas is beyond me.