“Time to Change”

By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor

If there’s one thing that’s always been true about Red
Hat–they’ve always had an uncanny ability to stay on message with
a single voice. “Uncanny” not in the X-Men sense, but more along
the lines of “pain-in-the-butt-to-get-information-from” sense.

Which is an exaggeration, to some extent. Red Hat never
stonewalled anything with me or any other reporter I know of, and I
know if I need a question answered, I can pick up the phone and
make a couple of calls to get what I need. Conversely, I know the
answer will be the same no matter who I call, so calling more than
one person at Red Hat for comment can be a superfluous action.

I bear no ill will towards Red Hat for the way they handle their
PR and marketing–it’s a corporate thing, and they really aren’t
arrogant about it. They’ve just decided to make sure they’re
putting out a unified message.

Until, it seems, recently. Now I’m not sure they know what their
message is. Worse, there are growing signs that the rest of the IT
industry is in the same boat as I am.

The most overt sign of trouble came earlier this month when Red
Hat VP Scott Crenshaw shot an uncharacteristically
hostile shot across the bow of the SS Novell. Speaking
at the London launch event for the company’s new Red Hat Enterprise
Messaging, Real Time, Grid (MRG), Crenshaw told the media that
Novell’s real time offering, SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time
(SLERT), was essentially a rip off of Red Hat’s real-time work.

That, at least, is how the media interpreted it. Looking at the
quotes from Crenshaw again, it actually looked like he was not
irked so much by the fact that Red Hat’s code was in SLERT as the
implication that Novell has not made contributions of its own to
Red Hat’s real-time work, thus creating a separate iteration of a
real-time kernel that, according to Crenshaw, was not as stable as
MRG. Naturally, some in the media forgot the whole “open source”
thing, and assumed there was some sort of outright theft going
on.

My problem is not who’s in the right regarding this incident–in
fact, Jonathan Corbet has an excellent
analysis of both parties’ contributions towards real time in
Linux over on LinuxWorld–my problem was why this had to be said at
all. This kind of sniping is what you might expect on a development
mailing list, not at a very public media event.

It didn’t hurt Novell, because they were first to market with
their real-time offering anyway. It didn’t help Red Hat, because
nearly everyone who heard these comments immediately thought “sour
grapes” or, worse, “threatened company in a weaker position.” It
certainly didn’t help open source as a whole, since such sniping
about open development only provides more FUD ammunition to those
who follow the proprietary way.

It was weird. And coming from the normally very composed Red
Hat, doubly so.

It’s not just this lowly pundit who’s noted trouble afoot. Just
this week, three financial analysts, each downgraded their estimate
on Red Hat, for different reasons.
Katherine Egbert from Jefferies & Co. cited growing
competition from virtualized servers as a concern, while
Kirk Materne from Bank of America had doubts regarding the
ability of Red Hat’s JBoss division to get traction. Trip Chowdhry,
of Global Equities Research also
has problems with the JBoss side of the house, calling it “a
complete failure.”

Let’s all agree that analyst’s opinions are a dime a dozen, and
not everything they say can be taken as gospel. Still, three in a
week is enough to raise an eyebrow.

Is something wrong? If there is, I get the sense that it’s more
of a re-grouping within the Red Hat walls so they can contend with
the new market position of the Novell/Microsoft team, not to
mention the sudden new buzz surrounding Linux on low-end PCs.
Certainly Red Hat is still the commercial Linux leader, but there’s
no getting around the fact that Novell has stopped just short of
falling off the business cliff and there’s evidence they’re clawing
their way slowly back onto solid ground. Linux’ sudden popularity
on the desktop has to be giving Red Hat a bit of pause, since this
is an area that Red Hat has never really pursued.

When new conflicts come at you from different directions, you
readjust your stance to compensate. You might even stumble a bit
while you’re compensating. I think that’s what we’re seeing now:
Red Hat is shifting its strategy, and while it’s doing so, little
deviations in the corporate direction are showing up. The net
result: we’re seeing a Red Hat that’s distracted, and off its game
a bit.

Can they recover? Yes, probably, though given the time of year,
don’t look for any major changes until after the end of the year.
Perhaps when they finally release that delayed online desktop
product. Until then, we can expect to see some interesting noises
as Red Hat seeks to find its new message and its new voice.