Red Hat's desktop strategy is now based on Windows?

One of the interesting things about yesterday's Red Hat press lunch in London was the emergence of a desktop strategy from the open source giant. The other was that the strategy is based around Windows.

OK, that's two exaggerations. RHEL Desktop has existed for a long while, but it's not had any major marketing that I've seen, and the company recently stepped back from making a consumer desktop product.

As to basing its strategy around Windows, Red Hat now has VDI (virtual desktop) software, which it is placing firmly amongst its management products. The meeting was mostly about server vritualisation, but we heard about desktops too.

Essentially, while servers are getting consolidated and managed better, the desktop is still a nightmare (despite moves like Intel's ongoing vPro effort).

Windows is the problem, in other words, and the answer to any problem in IT is to virtualise it. So maybe it's easier to persuade users onto a virtualised, centralised Windows, than to prise them off it and onto a replacement Linux desktop?

(And yes, I know that's just a new version of the old, and ever-more-plausible thin-client story).

What's clear is that Red Hat doesn't see any money in desktops themselves, only in the management of desktops.

That doesn't stop it having plenty of desktop software. Fedora is going from strength to strength, from all accounts, but it's a community release, not part of the main strategy.

We got an idea just how often Red Hat has to explain that, when we asked about Fedora.

"Fedora is not a product," the Red Hat CTO and president answered. In unison.