Who Will Buy Canonical and SUSE?
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Add to this banks, grocery stores, and airlines are moving off mainframes and to the cloud - and choosing OpenShift. IBM was starting to get eaten by Red Hat. Not to mention IBM is on the cusp of a major leadership change, and needs fresh cloud leaders to lead IBM into the next decades.
These are the reasons IBM bought Red Hat. Because IBM has lost its way. Red Hat had the most to offer.
Canonical doesn’t have much to offer. Few people are paying for Ubuntu. Yeah yeah it’s popular in Docker images, yeah yeah it’s a popular desktop distro. But so what? OpenStack is shrinking (SUSE abandoned it for Kubernetes) and Ubuntu has bet their farm on OpenStack. They don’t have much in the way of Kubernetes. On OpenStack Red Hat has most of the customers. Canonical has almost nothing to offer in terms of being bought out. They have very few items that produce profit. They made a huge (and flawed) bet on mobile and failed. Ubuntu doesn’t have strong leadership and doesn’t have strong clients - In fact I’ve been a consultant for 5 years now bouncing between companies every few weeks. I have YET to run into a Canonical client.
This is why no one will buy Canonical. SUSE? Well we’ll see.
I have never understood their paid support tier pricing model. They should have offered a low cost email only support, say with a 24 or 48 hour turn around policy and could have gain many enthusiasts and small companies some of which would have transfered to bigger contract.
> "Microsoft, which, according to one source, is referenced throughout the proxy statement as 'Party A,' first expressed interest in Red Hat back in March. But Microsoft dropped out of the running on October 10, according to the proxy, 'citing concerns about securing regulatory approvals of a strategic transaction in the US and Europe.'"
Google was also considering it
> "Google, which one source said was 'Party B,' met with Red Hat in the spring of 2018 to discuss partnerships. As a deal with IBM got closer, Google continued to move forward with the sale process, but stopped short of making an offer. Though Google's former Cloud CEO Diane Greene spent a lot of time with Red Hat ahead of its sale, she struggled to get support from the company on her large mergers-and-acquisitions aspirations, according to one source. So on October 20, Google officially declined to submit a proposal and instead asked if Red Hat would explore a commercial partnership and a minority equity investment from Google."
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Canonical... Doesn't.
The actually have a lot of stuff: LXC/LXD, MaaS, Juju/Charms and MicroK8S. These are all solutions to real problems but maybe they are lacking marketing because they are not well known.
Ubuntu as a whole has nothing people want to pay for.
Someone like MS would buy Canonical for completely different reasons, they're not big enough to effect Microsofts profits in any way, they dont have any really interesting tech, but they do have the Ubuntu brand and control of one of the really big linux distros (the biggest on the desktop) so there might be value in Azure being able to brand itself as the home of Ubuntu ("it runs perfectly on our cloud becuase we write it that way"). To be honest though I dont see that as a big enough thing to make MS risk their reputation as a good place to run Red Hat and openshift. The only other reason to buy Ubuntu would be to kill it, and the political ramifications of that to the open source friendly reputation they've worked hard to build would be bad.
The source code is the easy part.
consumer computing will struggle, even worse than it does in these days of android-vs-ios that made the old (windows vs will this be the year of linux on the desktop) days look like a free software hayday.
the cloudification of computing has destroyed any dreams of free software stacks - nowadays people call us thieves for not running other people's code on our own computer.
but those problems aren't caused by microsoft buying canonical. but embrace, extend, extinguish. it's a known game, and we're the losers, even when we feel like the winners. who cares what licence the kernel and ls are distributed under, that's not what anyon's buying.
Anyone else reminded of Microsoft when you read that? Windows Phone, Zune, MSN TV, and “several other software initiatives” (Bing, Bob, Clippy, etc)...
None of Canonical products reached the general consumer market in any significant ways while the Windows Phone and the Zune have good reputation (and have been actually sold to consumers). I hear Bing is doing okay and Clippy is from a different millennium.
Surface, Xbox and azure are doing great.
On Canonical side, I read somewhere complaining they suck at marketing, they could have done much better otherwise.
People are used to having their phone constantly upgrading automatically, which make it hard to explain to non-technical users why they need to `apt upgrade` regularly.
Why the focus on acquisition with vague synergy? HANA drives SUSE adoption, but the Linux piece is relatively static compared to the tooling required to scale and manage these big stacks?
I like to think HashiCorp or another software vendor sees the appeal of building their components into a sturdy Linux product like SUSE.
I might have speculated the same about Docker or Ansible, but they have already been similarly absorbed.
Rather than the consolidation in favor of existing and entrenched tech like SAP, it's inspiring to think a new IBM or Microsoft is being built and could benefit from a Telco-grade OS.
I will be gone by then, however in a couple of decades anything substantial based on GPL will be gone, and it will business as usual regarding UNIX wars.