| Comdex News will be the main subject as Doc Searls weighs in as a featured guest on two radio programs on Tuesday, November 23:
Biz Soup Tech Edition — 9-10AM PST, 12-1pm EST The Linux Show — 6-7PM PST, 9-10PM EST |
That Comdex is massive, sprawling and dysfunctional is one of the oldest clichés in the computer industry.Imagine the population of a city convening in a bunch of hotels and wandering around a vast promotional landscape for up to four days with few navigational aids an little infrastructural support. Nobody can "cover" it in a way that does justice to the whole. Or to anything. There is just too much going on. The best one can do is give a fun account of one's own experience. If I had a digital camera, I could have done that the way Dan Bricklin did. (Dan, for those who don't know, invented the spreadsheet along with his buddy Bob Frankston.) But I didn't, so prose will have to suffice.
— Doc Searls
Whenever I visit New York — my home city — I lament the passing of Vinny the cabbie: that generic character who complained endlessly about Jersey drivers and the effing mayor while banging over potholes in failing yellow Chevies, leaning on his horn the whole way. Now New York cabbies all seem to be sullen guys with no vowells in ther names. To be fair: cabbing around in New York is a lot nicer than it used to be. From stereo speakers behind your head, the voices of Beverly Sills and Vinny Testaverde implore you to buckle your seat belt while your driver — Ozmo Zdilmidgi or something — has approximately nothing to say. Hey, he's polite, but isn't this still New Yawk? Can't we complain about something already?
Thus it was fun to discover that New Yawk is now in Las Vegas. No, I'm not talking about surreal hotel replicant of the great city. I'm talking about Vinny."Hey you! Mister. You. Hey you! Where you goin? You needa ride? Five bucks. Come on." Thus spake the car service barker outside the airport. Nosttalgic sucker that I am, I took the deal, and got a nice forty-five minute tour of every hotel but my own, the run-down Imperial Palace, which, when I finally arrived, gladly sold me a room they wouldn't have ready until long after I could have used it for a shower.
So I grumbled off to dump my bags with the bellman and find a cabbie to tell me where the hell Comdex was (which sure wasn't in this hole). I hadn't been to Comdex in ten years, and I had no idea where anything was anymore. The old neon walls of the Strip had been town down and replaced by giant theme hotels, all set several acres away from the street, where the old neon and gaud had been replaced by marquees on pillars that seemed a stylistic cross between highway mall signage and ball park outfield scoreboards. The new hotels all looked like body-snatched versions of an idealized elsewhere: Venice, New York, Paris, Luxor. Equally magnificent and creepy. Where the hell was Comdex? Was it still at the Convention Center? Was the Hilton still next door? Naturally, I had forgotten the Linux Busines Expo poop that would have answered that last question in the affirmative.
I found a cabbie. He was unavailable, of course, but communicative — and in the language of my youth. "This was a real town when the rackets ran it," he said. "A guy gets drunk and loses his money, the casino puts him up and gives him enough to get out of town. They were tough bastards, but they were gentlemen. These fuckers, Jesus. They're all Disney, y'know. They don't give a shit. They just want to build something bigger and uglier than the next guy." It went on like that for a while. Eventually he told me I could register at the Sands, which was no longer a hotel, and located nowhere near where I remember it.
The Sands turned out to be a box about eight times the size of the average Costco. Facing a street in the back were about forty doors, all of which opened to anybody who wanted to enter and walk past the disinterested security people. Which I did. The hall was full of Asian companies selling boxes, boards, drives and other parts. Just like ten years ago, the last time I was here.
At the far end of the hall I registered, got my badge, and went off to find the Hilton, home of the Linux Business Expo. In minutes I found myself caught in crowdlock. The spaces outside the exhibit hall were packed to the walls with people waiting to get in (there was still a half hour to go before the show floor opened). Through this pressed a a river of people cutting crosswise toward the exit and the shuttle busses. I was a log in this river, which failed to move any faster than, say, two or three feet per minute. Unreal. Surreal.
But along the route Novell had placed hundreds of PCs with net connections and browsers. Bless them — even though their presence confounded the crowd even more. Men lined up three and four deep facing each one, as if at urinals during halftime.
Ourside the river tuned into a line about a hundred yards long that fed into busses. More Vinnies herded us like cattle. "No, it don't go to da hotels. It goes to da Convention Centa. Da Hilton? Yeah, it goes to da Hilton."
It was hot. The forecast was for a high of 63. It had to be 80. I was wearing several thick layers of clothing. By the time I got on the bus I was soaked in sweat.
Da Hilton is adjacent to Da Convention Center, which has several parts, each a box with the square footage of an airport. I spent half an hour looking for the Linux Business Expo in the wrong hall. When I finally found the right hall, which was somewhere under the Hilton, I joined the studio audience of Linux Today's live radio show, which was being broadcast on the Net in front of a live audience that consisted of me, two Slashdot guys and one Linuxcare guy. On stage Bob Young of Red Hat was sandwiched between the two radio hosts (Emmet Plant and Paul Ferris). The subject at hand was all the news Red had had just made by acquiring Cygnus for (did my ears hear this right?) about two thirds of a billion dollars (more about this below). In other Red Hat news, Bob kicked himself upstairs, to Chairman, handing over his presidency to Matthew Szulik. Most common question at the show: "Who?"
It's always fun to watch and listen to Bob. He's so full of beans, so devoted to The Cause — and so equally vague and enthusiastic at the same time. No doubt this skill contributed hugely to the company's success with VCs and now with The Street. To the surprise of many (but not me), the Hat People have held their value at over $100 per share, or upwards of $6 billion (and Bob's share at about an even $billion), according to the Red Hat Wealth Monitor. That gives them some serious pocket money (and make no mistake: it is money — you can exchange it for the real thing) to spend on acquisitions, which is an absolute necessity in a market that moves as fast as Linux is going.
I wanted to see if Bob would (as he and other Hatters have in the press recently) identify Microsoft as The Main Competition. Sure enough, he did. Sitting there, I wanted to point instructively to the smoking husk that was once Netscape, and say "see?" But I didn't. Instead I asked him what his new job was. "Same as the old job. Doing stuff like this. Being a spokesmodel for the company. We just slid the titles around." Or words to that effect. But he did agree to show up for the next Linux For Suits event, which was nice.
Later I sat in another audience, front and center (in a "Reserved for Media" chair), fighting sleep while Corel introduced their new Linux distribution and application suite, which now consists mostly of Wordperfect. Based on the Debian distribution and the KDE desktop, the OS looks pretty darn cool, I must say. So does the installation demo, which takes seconds if you approve all the defaults. My only problem was fighting the effects of sleep deprivation over the prior few days. I didn't want to be sitting there, front and center, snoring through one of the most exciting events at the show, for reasons that had nothing to do with the event itslef. It wasn't easy.
By the end of that first day it was pretty clear to me that Corel was the star of the Expo. They gave terrific demos and always drew crowds. And not just by trowing around free t-shirts and other bait. They had real stories to tell and real content to share. I loved their energy, frankly. More than any other company at the show they are equally Linux- and Windows-native, and seemed to be making the most of their entusiasm for the former and their experience with the other.
After the show closed for the day, several of us walked a couple miles over to the Venetian Hotel (it was walk or wiat for a cab on a line nearly as long), where I had the best calzone I';ve ever had outside New York (in a food court!), and joined 15,000 of the Linux faithful for Linus Torvalds' keynote. Linus' only obvious news was about the hypersecretive Transmeta. Ready? They're making a smart CPU: "The first micros=processor built with software," his slide said, insisting that the slide said all he could say. Details were coming on January 19th.
The name of the chip is Crusoe.
I was too lazy to get up and ask the question Linus would surely not answer: why all the secrecy? Why deny us the clues? I just don't get it. But I did get something else, and I'm not sure many others did. First, once again Linus had kind things to say about Embedded Linux. Second, he had kind things to say about Mozilla. He thinks stories of its demise are a bum rap.
This raises a question: is Transmeta hacking on Mozilla? Have they snarfed up all that wide-open-source code and started their own for-now-private version of the thing? I've got a feeling about this one.
I missed a 7AM meeting of the Linux Professional Institute, which is doing some good and necessary certification work, sponsored by Linux Journal (our own Phil Hughes is on the board) among many others. The big news there was the addition of SGI as a platinum level sponsor. Nice to see SGI among the increasingly deeply committed to The Movement.
Pretty much everything Tuesday was geared toward our own event: the combined Penguin Playoff and Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards, co-sponsored by Caldera and held at GameWorks in Las Vegas.
By definition all the winners were among the clueful. Perhaps the happiest were the Cygnus guys, whose company was just bought by Red Hat for $674 million. They guys were already calling themselves Red Hat. Maybe money can buy love. Interesting point of fact: by today's stock market closing (11/22), with Red Hat's shares are valued at $124.5 per share, the price for Cygnus is up to $824,730,828. Not bad.
Needless to say, TheCygnus Deal was Topic Number One at the Linux Business Expo. My own take: the price has the look of a nonrefusable offer. According to rumor, Red Hat has had a hard time making the acquisitions necessary to grow into the major player that the market bets it will become. It seems other Linux companies want to get rich the same way Red Hat did: with their own IPOs. Would a post-IPO Cygnus be worth $674 million? Probably not. Hence the deal. Of course, not everyone agrees.
Earlier in the day I had a long conversation with Bryan Sparks and Lyle Ball of Lineo, the embedded Linux spinoff of Caldera, the Linux company Bryan co-founded in 1994. These very conversational gentlemen are huge Cluetrain fans, and they clearly understand how markets work. What they're doing to turn Linux into the bedrock (to coin a metaphor deeper than "platform") of embedded systems — such as the non-PC "appliances" that are the sudden conversational rage — is highly significant. These guys strike me as equally far-out and down-to-earth. I really like their chances.
The major high point of my day came, however, when I met Don Marti of VA Linux Systems. To borrow a RageBoy superlative, he is a Gonzo Marketer of the First Water. Talk about starting fires. Don is the guy who discovered the silly Unisys Patent on the .GIF compression algorithm and made a great fun stink about it. He was a prime mover behind Windows Refund Day (that looks like Don on the right in the picture, but it's VA's Chris DiBona, who edited another Editor's Choice Award from Linux Journal, for the book Open Sources), and created one of the Web's great memes: the operating system sucks-rules-o'meter. More than a prankster, this guy is a thinker. I wrote down three or four of the lines he just dropped in conversation. They include these:
"Now it's time to hack the real world and let other people write Web sites about it."
"The Sucks-Rules-O-Meter is the first crude attempt to do the opposite of advertising — in which the customers do the writing and the supplier does the reading."
Wednesday was Graphon Adventure Day. I was supposed to meet with the Graphon people the day before at the Microsoft Pavilion (where, forgive them, they had business to do). We ended up rescheduling for Wednesday, but the first appointment gave me a chance to get whalloped by what we might call the Microsoft Reality Check.
It would be an unfair understatement to call the Microsoft pavilion "huge." It was immense, occupying what seemed like acres of unavoidable booth activity just inside the entrance to one of the main halls.There must have been a thousand people in this place at any one time. There were about 240 Microsoft Partners, each with their own mini-booth — in addition to the vast spaces devoted Microsoft's own countless 2000-vintage OS and application offerings. It was all packed. And I didn't see a single gun pointed at the heads of a single "partner" or any of their customers, forcing all these people do business under Evil Lords of Redmond. It may be politically and technologically correct in the Linux community to disparage Microsoft; but it would be wrong to deny the facts of the matter: facts that have nothing to do with anything more than Marketing 101. Microsoft does it very well. (And, I might add, Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact pay insufficient respect to the unwillingness of Microsoft competitors to do the same.)
Bottom line: the Microsoft Pavilion was all business. Lots of it. Significantly, however, no small number of those partners are also now members of the Linux community. Graphon among them. And this is a good thing.
I met with Robin Ford (Exec. VP Sales & Marketging) and Walt Keller (Pres & CEO) of Graphon at Pat Meier's long-standing Lunch at Piero's, a restaurant across the street from the main Comdex venues. I really like these guys. Like Corel, they're firmly in the Linux camp, but operating in the larger reality of what I'll call Practical IT. Most of their customers (like most of the world) are still running their enterprises on Microsoft software. Those companies can't chuck all that code and go with Linux overnight. Rather, they need strategies for adopting Linux without disrupting their existing infrastructure. Graphon has a family of products — GraphonBridges — that allow users of one platform to access their server-based applications from the other platform's client. So you can sit on your Linux client and access ny Windows or Linux applications over the Internet. Among other things. Cool stuff. I might add that these products are market bridges as well, providing Practical IT the beginnings of a migration path to the Linux platform.
Back at the LBO (as the Linux Business Expo became known, ignoring the "leveraged buy-out" acronym that was so popular in the Eighties), the crowds were beginning to thin on Wednesday afternoon, which gave me a chance to look around a litte more before I left the show for good. I saw that TurboLinux has a cool Linux/Mac dual boot installation that's almost ready for prime time (and perhaps for the incumbent Macs at our office here). I saw Andover.net's act coming together in a serious way before their expected IPO. Derek Carroll seemed to be having a great time presiding over perhaps the most productively geeky booth at the show. At the raised center of the booth, was a large screen tuned into the Slashdot site. Rob "Cmdr Taco" Malda, Jeff "Hemos" Bates and Patrick "Scoop" Lenz of Freshmeat relaxed across floppy furniture, pouring their reportage into slick little laptops that fed directly to the Net and onto the screen. For awhile there we almost got a group together to head out into the desert to watch the evening's meteor shower; but alas: it was overcast anyway, and Vegas beckoned.
As we found at the first Linux For Suits event, a funny thing happens when you put on a Linux-in-business event: you get more geeks. A lot more geeks than business people.
Nearly two years ago, when I interviewed Marc Andreessen about the Mozilla source launch, he said "Technologists are driving progress, and it's easier to drive with Linux than with anything else." As the Linux market grows, so do the number of technologists involved. This was clearly the case at this show.
I've seen a lot of different numbers for the LBO. About 38,000 — the top number — does seem right. That's as big as Comdex itself was in the early days. A large number of those are the Bag People: guys who walk around the shows dragging bags of promotional poop they'll later wonder why they ever picked up. To serve these attendees, many of the booths were set up to be more businesslike than what they would have been at a Linux-native show. But frankly I think they all would have been better off with a geekier orientation (such as the beanbag-covered floor with a hundred Net connections that VA Linux put up at the last Linux World). Linux may mean business, but the geeks are the ones that are going to make it happen. Just as they always have.