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Five Reasons Red Hat Should Ignore Consumer Desktops

thevarguy.com — So, you still want Red Hat to move into the consumer Linux market? Here are five reasons why Red Hat should absolutely ignore pleas for consumer PCs with Linux pre-loaded.

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  • raynevandunem, on 05/16/2008, -0/+1I agree. Canonical's revenue stream, just like Red Hat's, is dependent upon service charges for servers. But Red Hat does sell shrink-wrapped copies of their latest RHEL in stores, although Red Hat's products do not account for as much of their revenue as do their services.

    That makes me wonder, though: will separate open-source application suite projects, such as openOffice.org, ever generate their own product and service lines rather than remain perpetually dependent upon erstwhile funding from large companies?

    And if so, does that require that the projects, upon starting the businesses, begin to move their applications from just "consumer"-level (that is, for mostly-autonomous home PCs) to "service"-level (that is, for heavily administrated workstations)? And how does one make a service out of a desktop application?

    That's something that Canonical, currently a desktop OS vendor, can target (better than Red Hat) by creating services that will be useful for heavily-moneyed large businesses.

    If anything, I think Canonical's corporate desktop workstation-oriented services can focus on bugfixes, updates-by-subscription, backup and installation. Same for corporate mobile-oriented services (if such things exist).
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