First they ignore you,

Then they laugh at you,

Then they fight you,

Then you win

Then local datacenters move to the cloud

Then you don’t keep up with Amazon

Then you exit to IBM

Then you get used to shovel IBM garbage onto customers

Then you become an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.

Early 2000s red hat was wild and I was glad to be there. I’m still the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linu.

Context for early 2000s RH challenged individuals: It is a homage to the borrowed slogan RH used to have on posters and office walls.

https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html

Red Hat determined this path in 2001, when it started pivoting to enterprise customers only. Everything after that was just the usual progression for a minor enterprise player.