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ورقة بسيطة قمت بإعدادها قبل فترة حول استرايتيجية كل من مايكروسوفت و ريد هات في تسويق أنظمتها التشغيليه؛ سيسرني جداً الحصول على ملاحظاتكم بشكل عام، وانتقاداتكم بشكل خاص ..

Despite of the obvious differences in the vision of the product development in both Microsoft and Red Hat, both of them share in providing the same product (computers operating systems).
From this point, the question arises about the nature of the relationship between the two companies, is it a competitive relationship? Or a complementary relationship?
If the nature of the relationship of them was a competitive one, what would be the strategies pursued by the two companies to market their product in light of this competition?
At the beginning, we can say that although that Microsoft operating system (Windows) have approximately 90% of the share of the operating systems market and remaining shares are shared by the rest of the companies.
For the share of Red Hat operating system (Linux) the statistics conflict on the percentage representing the size of the share of the Red Hat operating system in the market but it might be true to say that it is about 4%.
Despite the obvious difference in size of the market shares between the two companies, Microsoft consider Red Hat as a source of concern, Matthew Szulik (Red Hat Chairman) has made it clear once by saying that he “finds himself everyday: on Microsoft’s radar!”. (2002)

I think it might be true to say that the reason for this is the smart strategies carried out by both companies specially in implementing marketing plans to market their products, as the smart strategy can often pose a threat to the rival regardless of the size of any of them; and to have such successful strategy, three objectives should be met in it and can be summarized as:
1 – Appropriate strategy in the company’s activity and competitors.
2 – Help the company to achieve a superior position to the competitors.
3 – Improve the performance aspects of the company profits, the financial position, and a strength place in the market in front of the competitors. Thompson, Strickland and Gamble (2010: p 15).

In light of the above objectives, when you try to read the strategies of both companies; we find that both strategies can be categorized as winning strategies.

To demonstrate this idea further, we find that Microsoft in term of achieving its marketing objectives for its product (Windows) it do the following:
1 – Employ professional programmers (one of the main reasons for this is to conceal the source code).
2 – Provide the product to manufacturers of computers and computer users at different prices.
3 – Determine the fixed cost of development.
4 – Provide free technical support.
5 – Publish updates / new products on a regular basis with new features and properties, to motivate PC users to purchase them.

The above steps helped Microsoft’s in achieving its goals, which makes the entry of another party to compete in the same successful steps above may not achieve the same results of Microsoft, because repeating these steps alone will not help immediately to overcome the factor of competition, and perhaps is what we see clearly with one of the biggest competitors of Microsoft as Apple, though the share of Apple in the operating systems market is about 7%, but on the other hand, we find that Apple surpassed Microsoft strongly in the mobile phones market.
Returning back to our main subject, the above example aims to support the idea that says the repetition of steps does not necessarily get the same result, or reaching same goal, but a smart strategy that meet the three conditions above in addition to an innovative steps will be without doubt a better way to compete and achieve results, which is exactly what was done by Red Hat in marketing its competitor product (Linux), by adopting the following steps:
1 – Publishing the operating system source code, with reliance on the efforts of volunteer programmers to develop and improve the operating system.
2 – Integrating of open source software with new versions of the operating system.
3 – Provide an optional paid subscription to clients for 24/7 technical support, in seven languages, in addition to updating the operating system every 12-18 months.
4 – Provide training solutions for the usages of the system and how to deal with it, where Red Hat certificate in the use of Linux is considered the best in the world.

These steps countermeasures and provided many advantages for Red Hat, as an army of programmers who are against the monopoly policy followed by Microsoft and believe in the importance of open source programs, which in turn led to massive development of the operating system, this made the operating system preferred in some cases more than Windows as is the case in the fastest supercomputers (2010).
This helped to spread the operating system (Linux) as it is a free application, and as an open source application, which encouraged users to experience it and then develop it and modify it to suit their needs and the needs of others.
The increase in the number of the system users, and then the increase of its uses; will need at some point to add further developments and enhancements in the operating system to fit more with its uses, in addition; the need for technical support and training; which is the major income sources to Red Hat, which has focused on increasing the size of the free system users, which will require later an increased demand for the paid services offered by Red Hat.

Conclusion:
Is not successful in getting the largest percentage of the market share only, nor to achieve the greatest possible amount of profits compared to competitors, despite the importance of winning strategy but there are many other factors control the company’s performance and help it to achieve its goals.
But despite this, the success of this strategy was one of the most important factors that helped the continued development of a small company such as Red Hat in the face of one of the largest companies in the world such as Microsoft, and even make it superior in some points.

Forbes (2002) Red Hat lives in Microsoft’s Crosshair [Online] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/2002/07/16/0716redhat.html (Accessed: 13 November 2010)
Wikipedia (2010) Usage share of operating systems [Online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems (Accessed: 13 November 2010)

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