[ Thanks to Rob Fenwick
for this link. ] "Q: You said that you never
intended for Red Hat to become a big fish in a small pond. Do you
think that that is the situation now, and if so, does that hinder
your company or help it?"
"Young: Let me give you the historic
background. When we started off, Slackware had ninety-five percent
of the linux market. It was probably a little bit less than that
because SuSE had also started off. We have since gone on, to take,
according to IDC, anywhere between fifty and seventy percent of the
market place. The next biggest vendor might be SuSE with something
like eight or nine percent, so on the face of it, if you focus very
narrowly on the open source and Linux space, yes we might be a big
fish - but we haven't actually converted any of those Slackware
users. There are probably more Slackware users in the world today
than there were when we started, so from a competitive point of
view we've done an incredibly bad job! The reason that we have
the market share numbers we do, and for that matter in Germany the
reason that SuSE has their numbers, is that we created more Open
Source linux users than all of our smaller competitors combined
because our focus was never on Linux users. Our focus was on
converting Windows and MacOS users and SCO users and Solaris users,
and that's what I mean by "growing the pond"."