Five Reasons Red Hat Should Ignore Consumer Linux Desktops
May. 16th, 2008 by The VAR Guy
Okay, it has been about a month since Red Hat said it had no plans to offer a consumer Linux release. Lots of folks went ballistic. The VAR Guy didn’t. Instead, he took some time to digest the news. And now he’s ready to say — definitively — that Red Hat made the right decision. Here are five reasons why Red Hat should ignore pleas for a consumer Linux release.
1. Money: Where is Red Hat going to generate the best profit margins and recurring revenue? The consumer desktop business is cutthroat. Meanwhile, global 2000 companies are willing to pay for ongoing service and support for higher-margin server deployments. That’s Red Hat’s sweet spot. And Red Hat should double down on that market by pushing deeper into applications that complement Linux.
2. Applications: Sure, Microsoft makes a ton of money selling Windows and the Office suite. But there’s no equivalent revenue opportunity in the open source world. Yes, OpenOffice is super hot. But is there really money to be made from open source desktop applications? If so, Red Hat certainly doesn’t own any of them.
3. Software as a Service: The real desktop opportunity involves SaaS. Desktops and mobile devices increasingly rely on Web browsers to access hosted applications. So there’s less software revenue opportunity on the desktop, but increasing revenue opportunity on servers with SaaS.
4. IBM OS/2 Warp: This entry should incite a few thousand angry readers. But here we go. Anybody else remember when IBM tried to make the leap from corporate software into the consumer market? It was a nightmare. Big Blue didn’t understand consumer support models, and thousands of customers wound up frustrated. The same would happen with Red Hat, which isn’t organized to support consumers.
5. Ubuntu: Right now, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux is the desktop darling of the open source world. Wonderful. Let Canonical continue to enjoy that spotlight. If Ubuntu truly goes mainstream, then Red Hat can mull buying Canonical. If Ubuntu never gains critical mass in the mainstream market, Red Hat can continue to take a wait-and-see approach to consumer Linux. (Full disclosure: The VAR Guy blogs about Ubuntu over on his sister site, Works With U.)
Ultimately, there’s no good business reason for Red Hat to move into the consumer desktop market right now. Linux advocates who claim otherwise are making emotional — rather than business-driven — statements.
Bottom line:
- Red Hat has a strong corporate server business.
- Red Hat is struggling to get its corporate desktop business moving in the right direction.
- Adding consumer challenges to the mix would be foolish.
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You could have ended the list with reason #1. Money. It’s that simple.
RedHat’s enterprise clients are migrating desktops to Linux eg. for call centers et cetera, so Red Hat have their Enterprise Desktop for them.
But consumers are not going to want to pay for support, and at the same time are going to want a lot of support to get their goodies working, from wifi to cameras, iPods et al – certainly not worth the hassle because let’s face it, when you can’t specify the hardware, Linux is a relative pain in the butt compared to Windows.
I think Canonical is investing in the consumer desktop primarily for personal passionate reasons of Mark Shuttleworth, and secondarily as a way to get into the market of corporate desktops and servers with monthly support subscriptions, so as to sell the company because then it’ll be getting too corporate and boring for the Benevolent Leader.
So the consumer desktop is Mark Shuttleworth’s entry strategy, and the enterprise is his personal exit strategy. Red Hat is in the enterprise already, so no need for them to market consumer desktops as a entry strategy like Canonical.
There’s too much fragmentation in Linux as it is. We don’t need another consumer desktop orientated distribution. And to be honest, I don’t really see the difference between Ubuntu and any other Linux. Once Gnome or KDE is up and running it’s all basically the same.
The whole consumer and corporate division only exists in peoples minds and in the additional support products.
Canonical are doing a fine job with Ubuntu. It’s meant specifically to be a desktop GNU/Linux distribution. What’s wrong with having Ubuntu on the desktop and Red Hat on the server?
Besides, if you want Red Hat on the desktop, then go for Fedora or CentOS.
–SYG
My God!! This is truly ridiculous !! Why do I read this things !!
@evanx: as consumer desktop is Canonical’s entry strategy to reach the server later, then a Red Hat consumer desktop move could preempt a future battle for server market share.
They can spend the money now, investing in desktop or wait and spend them later, when forced by competition.
Why doesn’t Red hat follow Mandriva’s lead and have an OS thats completely free and open source and another that includes non-free drivers, non-free software, and non-free repositories. I’d be glad to pay $50 for a Red Hat operating system. Red Hat is a multi-million dollar company, their is no excuse for Red Hat not to have a “REAL” (not Fedora) desktop OS for the consumers.
Ubuntu is still young in mainstream. I’m quite sure it will get stronger in a year or two. It’s getting there, faster than RedHat did, but also cause of everything RedHat did until now.
Red Hat isn’t wrong for not focusing on the Consumer Linux Market, and neither is anyone else who has decided to focus on Corporate Linux. Consumer support models are much more expensive to build and maintain, and the variety of hardware is much much wider, so many situations will arise where drivers are needed etc.
Additionally I would submit reason # 6 Why Red Hat Should Ignore Consumer Desktops is: Their current desktop strategy is similar to Intel’s 486SX chips, where RH has taken a fully-functional Server OS and removed the services from it and called it Desktop.
In the spirit of transparency: I am a Red Hat employee.
The thing that no one really seems to understand is that Red Hat already has a desktop OS, and it’s really good. I’m writing this from a RHEL 5.1 laptop. I’ve got Intel sound, Intel wireless, Intel ethernet and Intel accelerated 3D video. It all Just Worked(TM) at install time, no third-party drivers needed.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes in two flavors – Client and Server. Both have additional functionality which can be added either at or after installation time (clustering, virtualization, etc), but the message here is that there is already a desktop version of RHEL.
What Red Hat are not doing is going after Great Aunt Tillie the computer novice or nephew Joey who is the hard corps gamer. For business users, RHEL desktop is a very full featured, stable, highly functional, easy to use and easy to manage distribution.
You can get a RHEL Desktop subscription for anywhere from $80 to $339 according to https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/allProducts.html. For the price of that subscription you are not only getting a great distro, you are also funding the biggest commercial contributor to the Linux kernel, the glibc/gcc toolchain, etc. Pretty much everything Red Hat does is returned to the Linux and F/OSS community.
Var Guy, I have to disagree with your conclusion. I agree that there is no money in desktops. But if everyone starts using another distro on the desktop (Ubuntu), they will start using that distro in their data centers.
I have explained this more in a blog post titled, “Win the desktop, and you will win the server”.
http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2008/02/win-desktop-and-you-will-win-server.html
Keep up the great blogging!
Tristan Rhodes
Tristan @11: Yes, Ubuntu will *try* to leap to the server, and The VAR Guy believes Ubuntu will gain some traction there. But Ubuntu will need more server application support, more ISVs, more integration partners and more VARs promoting Ubuntu on servers. Remember: It took Windows NT about 4 to 5 years to get even decent momentum on the server following initial launch in 1993…
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Red Hat has made a right decision not to plunge into consumer desktop. Consumer desktop is already cluttered by many players – free and non-free, but none have really made any mark. So, why another fool attempt?
Manmath: The more The VAR Guy thinks about it, the more he believes you are correct. Red Hat is contributing quite a lot back to the open source desktop, and should be well-positioned if/when the company wants to pursue corporate desktops.
But consumer desktops? Not really Red Hat’s game…