Red Hat does not have to charge their prices to stay solvent. Their only business need is to increase productivity and profit. It is now a publicly traded company and has a responsibility to the stock holders (whether or not I like it). As for losing business, there are many times in which losing customers is more profitable than keeping them. I started my home based business servicing home computers on-site at a low rate. After a while, I was constantly driving, working or talking on the phone. I eventually tripled my rates, dropped most of my home support and retained 3 commercial customers. Even though I lost my one biggest account, I only needed to work about 1 or two days a week and my "keep" pay was the same as when I was busting my @$$ all week long. Likewise, Red Hat is probably catering to their "million-dollar" accounts that require less overhead to service and dropping their customers that might be making a profit, but costs them more to service and support. Sure, they may lose 25% of their "business" but what remains will be much more profitable leaving them with more time and resources to service their contracts, improve their product and work with Fedora. Well, that's my $.02 (or less) worth. Really, it's just business. Buck -----Original Message----- From: fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:fedora-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Holden Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 5:17 AM To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx; Benjamin J. Weiss; Alexandre Oliva Cc: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Fedora and the System Administrator On Wednesday 01 Oct 2003 1:43 am, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote: > If redhat can only stay solvent by charging $349 for there stable linux (remember thats the "cheap" version isn't AS > $1000) I find it very worrying for the competitiveness of Linux generally. In the short term I think they will make more money from people who will find it too costly to move to another OS but in the longer term I think they will lose a lot of business. Dave. -- Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer) Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org> Thanks in advance:- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See: <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html> UK Privacy (R.I.P) : http://www.stand.org.uk/commentary.php3 Public GPG key available on request. ------------------------------------------------------------- -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
