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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EnricoPalazzo who wrote (50076)	1/26/2002 1:25:11 AM
From: FR1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

creating technology isn't one of them. Actually, if AOL buys Red Hat they will not be looking to create a technology. All Red Hat does, for most of its money, is service Linux. If we had to ask ourselves why this would be good, there are a few reasons: 1) As you said, they would be in line to sue MSFT as MSFT tries to go after Linux. 2) IBM is putting a hell of a lot of money behind promoting Linux - primarily for web severs. Smart for IBM because Linux is a respected OS and it is free! No payments to MSFT. Plus IBM can sell support. 3) AOL would be following IBM's lead. Take a respected OS that has almost zero R&D cost to you and simply sell support. The community of Linux developers will do all the developmnet for free. 4) Taking the very long view, the Linux guys will slowly close the gap on MSFT for the consumer. Why? Because humans have incredibly limited ability to interface with a computer. Humans can only function in a very narrow sound range and at a very narrow baud rate. The same for sight and fingers. Therefore the things you want a computer to do for you are very limited. MSFT is way ahead in making this interface slick and nice but Linux is very slowly closing the gap. MSFT can't move the goldposts because the goldposts are the limits of your senses. It is just a number of years before the Linux word processing, database, etc interface is just as good as MSFT. And the OS is almost free - even for a thousand employees. Bottom Line: It is in AOL and IBM's best interest to promote Linux. They can make money off the service operations and hurt their enemy at the same time.