Shiny Red Box!
May 15, 2009 – 12:14 pmWorking for a big company* is going to be different. FedEx came today with a shiny red box; I opened it and was flooded with glossy paperwork, headphones, a window cling, and a USB stick with snazzy videos on it featuring employees from… it seemed like every continent except Antarctica. There’s an actual orientation to go to. There are departments. I’m scratching my chin and going “Oh! This must be what it feels like to have… infrastructure!”
It will be different! This is going to be an awesome learning experience.
It does not, however, prevent me from having to repeatedly explain to my family what exactly I am doing, though I think my dad’s accepted the “if they’re on the NYSE, they must be ok” argument. (“But then how do they make money?” “Support, dad.” “You mean to say there are more crazy people like you who make things for them for free?” “Sure, and sometimes they pay us too.” “And they sell the software?” “No, it’s… <insert libre/gratis explanation here>.” “But then how do they make money?”)
One of my goals this summer is to be able to explain open-source business models and what I do to my parents. If I can do that, I can explain it to anyone.
*I realize that Red Hat is not exactly massive compared to, say, IBM, but when the largest office you’ve ever worked in had 75 people, it’s definitely a “hello! minnow, meet extremely large pond!” moment.
4 Responses to “Shiny Red Box!”
Congrats on the new job!
By Luke Faraone on May 15, 2009
Congratulations to you … and to them for having the good sense to hire you :-)
By Tanya on May 15, 2009
As a business model, the idea of selling support for software is perfectly sane in the enterprise context.
Support is where all the marginal costs are. If someone gets a copy of RHEL from a friend and installs it (but never activates RHN, etc…) there’s no marginal cost to RH. Anything else kinda falls under “support”. With that said, providing downloads is cheap — the expensive part is dealing with specific people’s issues/situations.
And, really, support is the difference between a bunch of stuff that solves someone else’s problems and stuff that solves *your* problem.
And, in any event, if you lose $$$$ when your system goes down, it makes sense to spend $$$$ to have a claim on people who can fix it.
By Captain Segfault on May 17, 2009
Congratulations and don’t forget to tag your posts as sugar so we can follow them in http://planet.sugarlabs.org !
By Tomeu Vizoso on May 19, 2009