Matthew Szulik resigns as Red Hat CEO, is replaced by an airline COO
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 19:30.
Wow. If there was ever an industry that has little to nothing to teach the software industry, it's the airline industry. And yet that is precisely what Red Hat has done: Matthew Szulik, its long-time CEO, has resigned to be replaced by Jim Whitehurst, former COO of Delta Airlines, the paragon of disruptive and agile thinking.
This change heavily shakes my faith in Red Hat. Szulik was Red Hat. His competitive, sometimes combative spirit. His take-no-prisoners approach to competitors while treating customers with kid gloves. His obvious passion for open source.
Larry Dignan at ZDNet suggests that maybe Szulik will be the Linux ambassador to the world while Whitehurst focuses on operations. Possible, but isn't that what a COO is supposed to do? Why bring in airline dead-weight to manage something as disruptive as Red Hat? Did Red Hat really need a boring, old school CEO to manage its 21st Century software business? I don't think so.
Also:
Maybe Delta will go open sourced with RedHat ?
Any operations guy knows how important it is to get communications right, at the website level.
Airline operations now depend largely in grabing customers from other carriers, and schedule the flights efficiently.