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A lot of Microsofts growth in recent years has been in enterprise tools, not operating systems. Amazon do not break out their AWS revenue from their main reven

by adwf 13y ago

A lot of Microsofts growth in recent years has been in enterprise tools, not operating systems. Amazon do not break out their AWS revenue from their main revenue, hence one of the reasons it's a dodgy claim. Not to mention the fact that the article included the total Amazon revenue in the charts for no good reason. Likewise for Microsoft, who have multiple large revenue streams in the form of Office, etc... Not to mention Oracle, who are a database company that dabble in Linux (I've never actually met anyone who uses "Unbreakable" linux - yes, yes, anecdotal I know). When you remove the specious data points from the graph, you're left with RedHat on it's own. Even if you include the AWS estimate, you still have a much more reasonable graph that indicates RedHat competing in the same ballpark as AWS.

nl 13y ago
A lot of Microsofts growth in recent years has been in enterprise tools, not operating systems That's exactly the point (?!) I think you are looking at Redhat, and seeing them as a successful operating system vendor. Levine is looking at them as an enterprise software company who haven't grown revenues and/or profits at anything like the rate that other enterprise software companies have. He then sees that there are no other large software companies which have a business model similar to Redhat. He uses those two pieces of evidence to argue that there are better business models for Open Source than what Redhat does. You appear to be picking at things like if Redhar competes with AWS. That isn't his point at all - he's showing that AWS is an alternate business model which appears to have grown revenues much more successfully than Redhat.
- adwf 13y ago
  Fair enough. But the entire point of the article is that "There will never be another RedHat". It's the title, it's presumably the main point of the article - and it's ridiculously over-generalising. RedHat as a company, works. The market share is still largely with Microsoft, thus still available to be stolen away. Therefore, there is still room for a huge amount of competition in the OS vendor/support space. I can't see how anyone can argue against that. I'll grant you that perhaps RedHat could be making more money by spreading out into different sectors like SaaS and PaaS, but that doesn't mean that there can't be another RedHat in the market. I guess my main complaint is with how this point is argued. The charts are deeply misleading for the point that is trying to be made.

by adwf 13y ago

nl 13y ago

A lot of Microsofts growth in recent years has been in enterprise tools, not operating systems That's exactly the point (?!) I think you are looking at Redhat, and seeing them as a successful operating system vendor. Levine is looking at them as an enterprise software company who haven't grown revenues and/or profits at anything like the rate that other enterprise software companies have. He then sees that there are no other large software companies which have a business model similar to Redhat. He uses those two pieces of evidence to argue that there are better business models for Open Source than what Redhat does. You appear to be picking at things like if Redhar competes with AWS. That isn't his point at all - he's showing that AWS is an alternate business model which appears to have grown revenues much more successfully than Redhat.

adwf 13y ago
Fair enough. But the entire point of the article is that "There will never be another RedHat". It's the title, it's presumably the main point of the article - and it's ridiculously over-generalising. RedHat as a company, works. The market share is still largely with Microsoft, thus still available to be stolen away. Therefore, there is still room for a huge amount of competition in the OS vendor/support space. I can't see how anyone can argue against that. I'll grant you that perhaps RedHat could be making more money by spreading out into different sectors like SaaS and PaaS, but that doesn't mean that there can't be another RedHat in the market. I guess my main complaint is with how this point is argued. The charts are deeply misleading for the point that is trying to be made.