Who can you trust?
April 27th, 2007 by John Dragoon
We’ve all heard the old adage, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”. So it is once again with Mark Webbink’s latest article in Linux Magazine “A Matter of Trust”. Mr. Webbink, by the way, makes his living as an attorney at Red Hat.
For months now I’ve been biting my tongue and sitting on the sidelines as comment after comment from executives at Red Hat go unchallenged about Novell, our Linux business and our partnership with Microsoft. In truth, you won’t hear anything emanating from Red Hat about the value of interoperable Linux and Windows solutions. No, it’s far easier to patronize Novell, question our motivations and intentions, and challenge the integrity of our company.
Now Mark has decided to cast an even wider net and lecture us all on trust, the characteristic customers value most according to him. It seems Mark and his company are getting fatigued by the competitive nature of our marketplace and this time he calls out Oracle, Microsoft, Novell and Sun as somehow not worthy of the trust of customers. Beyond the patronizing and self serving tone of his muse, he’s kind enough to declare his company and a few others as “clearly distinguished by their transparency and desire to be trusted.” The only thing that’s transparent here is Mark’s use of an important issue like trust to advance his company’s sales agenda. I’m not sure who appointed Mr. Webbink as the moral authority but fortunately for all of us in the industry, the customer is the final arbiter.
Red Hat doesn’t like the competition. They much preferred being the only game in town. Well they are not. Accordingly, they’ve been liberal in their comments about our intentions in Linux and our partnership with Microsoft. Seems like anyone who competes with Red Hat can’t be trusted, according to Mark.
We understand that Red Hat doesn’t like our collaboration with Microsoft. We don’t expect them to. The fact is our customers do like the benefits of the Novell / Microsoft collaboration and 90% of customer’s surveyed, including Red Hat’s own customers, agree. It’s what happens when you align with your customer’s agenda.
We don’t have to dig too far into Red Hat’s historical public comments about the Novell / Microsoft deal to understand they aren’t really looking at this from a customer perspective. These comments – pretty outrageous by most measures – went mostly unchallenged.
Last November 21st, Mark Webbink himself blogged that the Novell / Microsoft deal was an appeasement similar to Neville Chamberlains’ appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938. I guess Novell is Great Britain and Microsoft is…well you get the picture. This from an attorney at Red Hat.
Around that same time, Red Hat’s General Counsel suggested in his musings that as a result of the Novell / Microsoft deal, Red Hat would be the ‘last commercial Linux distributor standing”. How’s that for freedom of choice and competition?
As you can see, I’ve had enough. I’ve spent an entire career taking the high road but when my company’s intentions are challenged without regard to the facts, well, I’m not going to take it anymore.
We will continue to compete on the merits of our solutions. I’m all for a healthy debate on our technologies, services, sales and support….and yes even our marketing. The competition keeps us all on our toes and the customer is the real winner.
The fear, uncertainty and doubt campaign and rhetoric serves no purpose. It’s a smokescreen for some other agenda and you can be certain it’s not about choice (or trust) in the marketplace. It’s certainly not what the open source community, and the markets we all serve, would applaud.
John