From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Thu 09 Sep 1999 - 14:55:28 IST
David Murphy spoke thusly:
>So toothbrushes turn out to be a bad example 8). For toothbrushes,
>substitute an utterly commoditised product. One that can be perfectly
>legally duplicated, renamed, and sold at a fraction of the price.
>Would you value a company which sold A) that product and B) support
>for that product the same way as you would value a company that sold a
>unique product?
>
>I wouldn't - I'd treat it as a vendor of support, and ignore the
>product. I'm saying that investors don't understand that the product
>is a commodity, and are treating it as if it were a proprietary
>product. A proprietary product is worth more than a commodity, no?
redhat wants to focus on support. they also want to do that internet
portal thingy, blech. but if you look at companies like ibm, sap,
anderson consulting - they focus (mainly) on solutions/support.
a huge amount of software is custom built, or made for internal use
only. i can easily see redhat involving themselves in that either
as "the system guys" or for the whole system from the os to the
apps.
if you compare msft to ibm, you'll find that the company that msft
"beat" has outperformed it. and they generate huge amounts of revenue
through service and support solutions.
redhat is in a position to be the first company people think of when they
want to go find a linux solution provider. "i want to build up my
ecommerce site - it should handle x number of customers, provide
advertising feedback on these schedules in these formats, order inf
should integrate into our inventory control system x, and we'll need
to connect up to these payment systems. let me see what a linux
system can do here, i'll call redhat." and redhat has alan cox
to write network drivers for this lady's weird network cards, and
some other people to write gnome components that can present the
numbers in pretty ways, and other people to do other bits, and voila -
a huge contract drops *ploink* in their lap.
perhaps that's what the investors are betting on with their experience
with other such companies. and unlike anderson, sap, and even ibm on
some projects, redhat can control it's own fate on the software side
and since linux runs on a lot of hardware they can use competition to
exert control on that end.
redhat can make gobs of cash if they use the money they've raised
right. they don't need something unique - just ask other unix vendors
what unique products have helped them get - but they do need to make
their non-unique stuff work very, very well.
>Actually, I'm a multimillionaire stockmarket genius, who's slumming it
>for a while ;)
well if you've got any big bags of money to store feel free to give
me a ring.
kevin
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