Red Hat Desktop strategy

Much has been made in the press and on community sites about Red Hat's ambivalence in the "desktop" space. If you're reading this, you may have written an article or two on it yourself. Or at least flamed us in your blog. The most vocal detractors seem to agree that when Red Hat dropped Red Hat Linux and retail boxed sets, we were in effect reneging on our consumer desktop. I say "consumer" desktop, because the world has varying definitions for desktop; it's a commodity term needing qualifiers such as "corporate" or "consumer." We don't expect those to be the same class of users any more than you'd expect to find NT running as your gaming and entertainment platform. Desktop also means KDE v. GNOME, or the beige thing on your desk's top.

Hence the first seed of the dilemma. We have conflicting terminology.

The second part of the dilemma is that we had one product line, drawn from common bits that moved too slow for some and not fast enough for others.

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