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Posted on 01/22/2009 9:23:01 AM PST by N3WBI3
In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems' market capitalization for the first time.
Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market.
As I write this, Red Hat's market capitalization sits at $2.62 billion, while Sun is just ahead, at $2.7 billion. The stock prices are way out of whack with revenues: Red Hat pulled in $627 million in 2008. Sun? More than $13 billion.
Such is Wall Street's confidence in Red Hat's Linux focus, however, that the market capitalizations between the two companies are almost at parity.
Both companies, of course, have product portfolios beyond Linux or Unix. Sun, in particular, has been significantly expanding its portfolio to include full systems that comprise software (OS, database, storage, portals, etc.), services, and hardware.
Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun's market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat's. But for now, a symbolic moment is about to occur. The inauguration of the Linux-based economy? Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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“Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun’s market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat’s.”
If they are talking about Solaris, I tried it a few years ago and depending how they have developed it since then, they have a long road ahead on the OS side. I must say though that their open office product is excellent!
I got 100 shares of RHAT’s IPO, and so well remember watching my stock data feed and cheering as the share price make $300. I eventually sold at about $100. Silly me.
MM
I think this says more about Sun than Red Hat.
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