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Technology Stocks : Red Hat Software Inc. (Nasdq-RHAT)
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To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (139)7/20/1999 2:38:00 PM
From: Matthew Wecksell  Read Replies (4) of 1794
 
Ladies and Gentleman, I present Tom Watson as the reason Red Hat *needs* to IPO if Linux will succeed.

There are lots of people like Mr. Watson who really understand Linux, and dig it because of how wonderful it is. The Tom Watson's of the world who work in IT tend to have managers who don't trust anything that isn't Microsoft or backed by a very big support contract with a very big company. So they ignore linux while their tech heads use it at home.

And then, after August, the Tom's of the world will be able to look at management and say, "There is this $1 Billion company out there that can give you a support contract for a product that I'm already intimately familiar with, that never crashes in a server environment, and that has this thing called Samba that'll let the end users not have to know that we've changed the back end servers."

When Tom says The most likely mindset of the higher inteligence users of Linux is to use free or low cost support, I hear "Red Hat can charge Company X a lot of money for support and then get away with not providing anything other than a warm fuzzy feeling for the management of Company X because the guys in IT at Company X already know the product and already know how to work USENET and the web to solve their problems."

---matt, didn't mean the above to offend Mr. Watson and applogizes if it did.
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