Has Red Hat scrapped its plans to take on Microsoft with a Linux desktop machine for the emerging world?
Unfortunately it’s not easy to answer that question. A Reuters report from India suggests the answer is yes. But my own questions to the company over the past 24 hours have brought nothing in the way of enlightenment, and Red Hat has now instead churned out this verbose and obtuse posting on its company “blog” (if companies keep using their blogs for this kind of corporate-speak we’ll even look back on good old press releases with nostalgia.)
To save you the pain of reading the whole thing, these are the key sentences:
We originally hoped to deliver RHGD [the "global desktop" product] within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes.
“Hardware and market changes”? That’s pretty broad. The only thing to emerge from all of this is that we will probably have to wait at least another year to find out if Red Hat is still interested.
