The second act is the hardest trick in business.
Most companies don't get the chance, or don't take it. They make a success and milk that success until the milk runs dry. Then they die.
Some companies can get a second act out of one great entrepreneur. Bill Gates did MS-DOS and he did Windows. Steve Jobs did the Macintosh, and then iOS with its iChildren – iPod, iPhone, iPad. IBM did its second act with the son of its founder, the computing apple of Tom Watson Jr. falling near the office products tree of Tom Watson Sr.
The rarest second act is that which is performed by a second entrepreneur. Because once someone builds a company, it's very rare anyone else will get the chance to bet it again.
RedHat was built on Linux, by Matthew Szulik. Red Hat, Linux, open source, they're synonymous and firmly locked in the imagination. But now Jim Whitehurst (above) is trying to give RedHat its second act.
Whitehurst has bet the company on OpenShift, an open source PaaS system that can be built on top of a cloud infrastructure. That means Amazon can run it, and Open Stack can run it.
OpenShift is to Red Hat what Windows was to Microsoft. If this fails, RedHat goes down.
And there's a ton of competition, starting with Microsoft itself.
The advantage OpenShift has over Azure is, of course, that it's open source. But so is VMWare's Cloud Foundry. What Red Hat hopes is that its commitment to standard components and open models will attract developers to it – that it can be more open than thou.
But if you are more open than thou, how do you make money? This is where Szulik's RedHat provides an answer. Because Linux is as open as all-get-out, and JBOSS was GPL code for middleware. The company was built for this challenge.
Still, make no mistake. It is a challenge. Whitehurst has put a lot of development resources into OpenShift, and he is betting the company on it. I don't know whether he'll win or not. That depends on a lot of people at big companies, and with big brains, making big decisions over the next few years. He'll have to be as nimble as Gates and Jobs at their best to prove that the PaaS layer is the key to the technology, and that he has the right solution for the market.
Do they teach guts at Rice?
