On November 3, 2003 08:33 pm, James Sparenberg wrote: > OK, > > Guess what .... RH9 is the last Redhat distro to be released. At > least as a free OS. > > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1371164,00.asp > > For the article. After next summer they will no longer support or > release patches for RH. Everything has moved to the Fedora project from > there forward. Hmmm. I'm wondering if that smell I'm smelling is > gunpowder and toe jam. There strength in the US has always been Word of > Mouth advertising. If they chose to move out of the community as a > brand I suspect that they will either have to create an advertising > dept/budget or face the loss of brand recognition. The first one > affects profits directly. The second more subtly. An interesting > position. Kinda GM like. "We've been selling those brands for 20 years > and everyone knows them, lets drop the brand lines and stop > advertising". (this was done to the Oldsmobile line btw.) *Sigh* sounds > like the marketing experts are at it again. > > James
Like the author I'm only mildly surprised they've moved in that direction. The surprise is they've moved that fast. I am concerned that they'll cut their noses off to spite their faces with this one though. The brand is the most important thing they have. And not supporting a free OS may find them not getting any new customers who might have downloaded/purchased boxed sets/etc for a test drive before jumping in. OTOH, they have deals with IBM, our friends today but who knows what tomorrow, and others to bundle their Enterprise stuff so maybe it will work out for them. That seems to leave just Mandrake and SuSE for the desktop and we both know which is better in that enviornment, don't we? :) ttfn John
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
