I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old.
Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
I don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on RHEL & CentOS).
Do you think IBM cloud will get more competitive price and feature wise? AWS (and Google and Azure, etc) are overpriced in many ways (dgress charges anyone?). I would love to see IBM cloud be price competitive. If it also then featured first class Red Hat products that could be compelling even to startup and hobbyists. I'd happily pay the same cost I pay now for a VM to get the equivalent CPU/mem/disk in an OpenShift cluster.
Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.