Fri 4 Jan 2008
What’s not to love about Red Hat’s new CEO?
Posted by J5 under Individual Blogs , Redhat , music[9] Comments
From Matt Asay’s interview with our new CEO:
Tell me a little bit about yourself. What are the last three bands you listened to on your iPod?
I don’t have an iPod (or a Zune). It won’t play Ogg Vorbis files.
This is from a guy who knows a thing or two about generating profits and value. It is an exciting time to be a Red Hat employee.
January 4th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Haha, awesome
Was that also meant as a slam on Matt Asay? Would be even more amusing if so
January 4th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Cool!
Just as a side note, my ipod does play Oggs… I run rockbox on it, and it works great.
January 4th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Not a slam. Matt admitted he was wrong when questioning Jim’s tech street cred.
From the article Matt says:
“For those like myself who believed that Red Hat made a mistake in its selection, we were clearly wrong. Red Hat has another believer at the helm. Well done.”
January 4th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Well, what I had meant was that Matt Asay is a bit of a hypocrite in that he uses Apple products more than he uses Free Software yet criticizes people for not holding Free Software ideals on a high enough pedestal.
Anyways, when he criticized your new CEO, I (and likely a lot of others) simply ignored him. He’s played the fool far too many times to even be listened to anymore imho.
That said, it’s nice that he at least admitted he was wrong.
January 4th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Quite nerdy approach he had in that answer to be honest. A proper answer would have said “I don’t use Ipod, but with my present player I have listened to X, Y, and Z recently.” Instead of that he went into irrelevant ideological rubbish. It’s really going to be exciting times for RedHat when instead of sane good businesscraft (all about money) it will be lead like one of those religious nut cults.
January 4th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Haha, I love it when anonymous trolls give advice. It is a good laugh. How many multi-million dollar (or multi-billion in the case of our new CEO) companies have you run? Red Hat’s success can in part be attributed to the attitude encapsulated in that one simple answer. What Jim did was show Wall Street that he wasn’t going to change that particular aspect of Red Hat. In the interview he shows an understanding of the Red Hat values which have made it such a successful company.
January 4th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
> In the interview he shows an understanding of the
> Red Hat values which have made it such a successful
> company.
Agreed. That is how I interpreted his answer to the iPod question – it was more about showing where his values are which is important for “street cred”.
January 5th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Ahh I love getting a little argumentum ad hominem at the morning.
Seriously, what succeess? 0,8% market share of the desktops (iPods don’t have much to do with servers so their server share is irrelevant anyways within this topic) isn’t really success.
January 5th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I don’t even know what argument you are on? The iPod question was merely one of those journalistic jokes that has permeated the pop media. Wall Street wanted to see if Jim would fit in with Red Hat or be a center of disruption. Jim took the opportunity to show he held Red Hat’s core values (and that he understood technology more than people were giving him credit for). If you read the rest of the article he expands on this. The simple statement was merely a headline, attention grabbing statement.
Trying to say Red Hat is unsuccessful because of desktop share is seriously like saying Delta is unsuccessful because of their share of the bus transportation market. If you really want to take your argument to the edge of stupidity but actually be consistent, Red Hat doesn’t even sell mp3 players so I guess we must be very unsuccessful.
Thank god I trust Wall Street’s metrics on success more than I trust yours. Oh, no another ad hominem argument, except it is not. You are arguing about success and trying to give advice. It is perfectly legitimate to question whether or not you have the expertise to make such statements.