On 5/16/07, Alan DuBoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Fundamentally, Sun seems to look at OpenSolaris as a product, and I think there's fault in that vision. In your example, I would site that Fedora and Ubuntu are different to me. Why? Because Fedora is supposed to be the open and free version of Red Hat. Do you think Red Hat markets Fredora as a product for ROI as a business? IOW, is media sales considered an actual revenue? They used to look at Red Hat Linux as a revenue in regard to selling media, as they do RHES now, AFAIK. But do you think Red Hat expanded to open up more potential revenues? I'm just curious how you look at that.
I see Fedora as a missed opportunity (for RH). They had the volume market (with Red Hat Linux), and they abandoned it. They created Fedora to fill the void, largely because they didn't want Debian coming in and nibbling away at them from below, but that clearly didn't work (one word: Ubuntu). Sure, Fedora is a great QA vehicle for Red Hat, but what about the hordes of people who are putting Fedora into production (and, yes, there are a lot of them--this is a different group of people than the group Solaris targets today). What happens when a handful of developers builds a web application on Fedora, puts it out in the wild, and ends up with the hottest thing on the web? How do they avoid the Friendster problem--death by success? What's the "upgrade path" to support now that they too are facing the same scaling etc. problems faced by the "enterprise" customers? Bottom line: With Fedora, there's no way to do that--Fedora and RHEL are two different products, so there's no way to leverage the network effects. Worse (for RH), they've created a competitor--yes, Red Hat's biggest competitor is not Novell, it's Fedora. That smells like opportunity to me.
One problem I have is that whenever corporate gets their minds around products, they start to associate revenue streams with them. OpenSolaris should not be thought of in that regard, and more to the point, Sun should focus their marketing and revenue streams around Solaris which is their product. This is similar to the relation between RHES and Fedora for Red Hat, and I see Ubuntu being much different than Fedora in that regard, isn't Ubuntu a business/company?
What's wrong with revenue streams? Solaris and OpenSolaris appeal to two very different audiences. We have a product for one audience today but not for the other, and we need to fix that. -ian -- Ian Murdock 650-331-9324 http://ianmurdock.com/ "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
