On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 15:21, David Holden wrote: > I wouldn't go so far to say redhat are doing wrong, you do what you > think you need to for you business. > > > However, you say that business and consumers have different needs but I > suspect a lot of businesses (at least small ones) have gone down the > redhat route not realising that you were going to either force them onto > a yearly upgrade cycle or have to pay >5 times(minimum) what they way > paying for updates for each machine so that they don't have to upgrade > each year.
We realized that the original Advanced Server at $800 was too much for many small businesses to pay. That's why we just released the ES and WS products at much lower price points. Of course, there are going to be some small businesses that can't afford to pay even these lower prices. For them, they can still upgrade RHL yearly for free. I understand that they'd like for us to support a $40 product for five years, but it's just not economically feasible for us to do that. If they went down the "Red Hat route" assuming that we would do everything for free or almost free, then I think that was a mistaken assumption. Based on the number of registered systems on Red Hat Network, we see that the vast majority of our current users are running 7.3 or 8.0. That means that most of our users have upgraded their machines in the last 12 months. I'm sure that there are plenty of 6.2 machines still kicking out there, but I think that the impact of the shortened errata policy is exaggerated somewhat. Another thing I'd like to emphasize is that we aren't "forcing" anybody to do anything. If they want to stick with 8.0 for five years, that's fine. They can learn a bit about packaging and make their own or they can hire a third party company to do it for them. If you can hire somebody else to support RHL for less money than buying an Enterprise release from us, go for it. If this is the case, then we've got the pricing all wrong and the market will force us to change. Cheers, Brent -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
