2008 marked not just the beginning of a new year for Linux vendor Red Hat, but also a new beginning for its new CEO Jim Whitehurst. Whitehurst spoke with the InternetNews about his plans to tackle the challenges the Linux company faces. He discussed why the Linux business is different, why he’s not getting into the database business, where Microsoft fits into his plans and what his biggest challenges are in moving Red Hat forward.

Click here to read this Q&A.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

Q: What are the biggest differences between Red Hat’s business and the airline business? Or is business business and this is just a different vertical?

In terms of direction and strategy it’s obviously fundamentally different as we’re selling a different type of thing. Open Source is a very different business model. Therefore, thinking about strategy and partnerships and how to invest in those things are different.

Seventy-five percent of business is executing on what you’ve decided to do. I’d rather have a less good strategy that is executed flawlessly than a flawless strategy that is executed haphazardly. Execution is execution.

It’s all about ensuring that the right people are in the right jobs with the right capabilities for the thing that we want to do and there is clear accountability, milestones and incentives to make sure things happen. Those things are common.

To some extent, my first few weeks at Red Hat have not been dissimilar to what I did at Delta. Go out and talk to our people, our customer and partners and really understand what they are looking for, what the problems are and fix those problems. That’s common to any business that is out there.

So while the strategy is different the execution of making sure the right people, measures, metrics and milestones are in place is similar.

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