OStatic

In case you were wondering, Red Hat--fresh off a rosy earnings report that was interpreted by analysts as a welcoming present for new CEO Jim Whitehurst--has absolutely no plans to deliver a desktop product for consumers anytime soon. In a news post at the company's site, team members write: "We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future."

While there has been much speculation that Red Hat might target the consumer desktop, I'm not surprised by this news. Why isn't the company delivering such a product? Becase it doesn't need to.

While Red Hat is near and dear to the hearts of many Linux and open source users, let's keep in mind that it is not only a public company that answers to its shareholders, but one that is doing phenomenally well in a shaky market. In response to the company's latest quarterly earnings report, the New York Times titled its summary No Recession at Red Hat.

Red Hat's quarterly sales, reported in March, rose 27 percent and earnings were above analysts' conencus estimates. The company is forecasting growth of 30 percent for the fiscal year that it just begun. It also sits on a $1 billion cash reserve, and predicts that fiscal year sales could reach $680 million by March of next year.

As I've suggested before it looks very likely that Red Hat will be an acquisition target from a much bigger company. I've suggested that Oracle might be a likely suitor, given that it has offered a Linux distribution similar to Red Hat's but charged more for support than Red Hat does, and has not gone far with that strategy. In response to my post, two readers said they saw HP as a likely company to be interested in an acquisition. IBM is also a candidate.

According to the desktop team at Red Hat, these are the current desktop goals:

1. Delivery and fostering of client technology advances through upstream community and partner collaboration. This means that much of the stuff we develop, and there’s a lot of it, is driven into the upstream open source community. It’s sad to see that not all vendors in the desktop space are doing this. By failing to be good community players they slow progress for everybody.
2. To build revenue-generating products. Something that any public company is in business to do!
3. To ensure that our desktop products complement our server and middleware products. Red Hat’s goal is to provide an integrated and comprehensive set of open source solutions, and the desktop has a vital part to play.

The team explains its decision not to offer a consumer desktop product, too: "As a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative."

Once again, they're not doing a consumer desktop product, because they don't need to. As Matt Asay noted on his blog, Novell President and CEO Ron Hovsepian has also noted that its own Suse Linux at the desktop is unlikely to be popular in the next three to five years. Novell is firmly focused on the enterprise for desktop offerings over the next few years, not consumers.

None of this spells death for Linux on the desktop, of course, at least not for business users. I am excited by the upcoming delivery of Wine 1.0--many years in development. It and many other trends point to good bridges between desktop Linux and Windows, which I've written before is what might really give Linux on the desktop a meaningful boost. For now, at least, that boost is not going to come from Linux players with deep pockets who answer to shareholders.

Are you disappointed in Red Hat's decision? Is it bad for Linux and open source?

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