Thursday, November 28, 2002
*** Putting the Free back in Enterprise ***
Between the last SuitWatch and this one I've been on the road, first to North Carolina and then to Las Vegas for the latest Comdex. I'm heading up to the Bay Area two more times in the next few weeks, first for Thanksgiving weekend (which begins today, in case you're reading this at work and haven't noticed) and then for Supernova, Kevin Werbach's new event in Palo Alto. I'll be on a panel there. <http://www.pulver.com/supernova/>
So you'll forgive me for not making it to Boston for the Enterprise Linux ForumConference & Expo 2002 <http://www.jupiterevents.com/elf/fall02/>. Looks like it'll be a good show. I'd like to hear from readers about it. (Write me at <[email protected]>)
While there is no doubt that Linux is already a huge success in the enterprise (or why would Microsoft still call it the "Number One threat"), you'd hardly know it from the nearly complete absence of Linux-related anything at Comdex. It's like some kind of ice-based netron bomb went off, killing only the penguins. I only found two companies that seemed interested in talking about Linux at all. One was Sun, and the other was Microtel.
Sun didn't have a booth on the floor, but Scott McNealy, its highly quotable President & CEO, gave one of the keynotes. While he didn't go out of his way to shine much light on Linux, he closed his speech by featuring two new products on stage, both of which featured a Linux GUI. One was a new appliance and the other was a box from Pirus, a company Sun recently acquired. The box manages storage across heterogeneous servers with Sun, Linux and even Microsoft operating systems.
Heterogeneity, he said, was the prevailing condition in most enterprises, and the best approach was to embrace it. Nice to see Sun doing that with Linux.
I ran into Microtel across the street at an old Italian restaurant called Piero's, where Pat Meier Public Relations hosts a much-appreciated lunch thing that's been at every Comdex for many years. The Microtel guy told me that their boxes are selling very well through Wal-Mart.com, but put to rest the rumor that some of them are sold through the chain's retail stores. They aren't -- not yet, anyway. He also told me that people liked boxes with the new Lycoris distro, and the Mandrake boxes as well; but that boxes with Lindows installed were still the best sellers.
That was about it.
The rest of the show was a combination of Microsoft and packing material. Dell, Apple, IBM, 3Com, Sun, Sony, Canon, Epson and other big names were conspicuously absent. H-P was there, with a huge booth, though not nearly as gargantuan as Microsoft's, which seemed to occupy almost an entire raised floor at the show's entrance (the press room was like a suburb of the Microsoft booth). Nearby were Toshiba and Fujitsu. Acer was across the way in the North Hall. Much of the rest of the floor space was taken up by countries and regions: Hong Kong, France, the U.K., Korea, Taiwan. Nice to see, but not exactly box office stuff.
All four of those hardware companies were showing off Microsoft's new Tablet PC, which Bill Gates also featured in his show-opening keynote. So did HP's Carly Fiorina, in her keynote, which followed Bill's. She even used a Tablet PC to send a note to Microsoft President Steve Ballmer, whom she said was in the audience. In the hour she spoke, Linux hardly came up at all. I counted only three brief mentions.
Every desktop and laptop by those same four companies also bore Windows-brand stickers that bore the legend, "Designed for WindowsXP". When I asked company personnel at the four hardware vendors' booths about Linux, reponses ran from chilly to flustered. One Toshiba guy said, "We don't do that" -- as if I had asked him whether the company bundled porn with their boxes. One HP guy told me I could order a Linux box configured to order (CTO) on the Web site. But when we tried, Linux was nowhere to be found. He apologized effusively and said it would be up on Monday. I've tried to make it work since then without success (mostly the pages load so slowly I lose patience).
But Linux was a big issue in the Great Debates held in a kind of ampitheater at one end of the main convention hall. I was a panelist in the first debate, titled "The Computing Re-Revolutionaries: Business, Consumers, or Both?" Helping hold up my side was Aaron Swartz, a 16-year old developer who three years ago won the ArsDigita prize for developing non-commercial Web sites, and two years ago co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification. <http://www.aaronsw.com/>
The next Great Debate was "The Gold Rush for Intellectual Property: Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley," and featured the EFF's John Perry Barlow and the FSF's Richard M. Stallman against three guys from the entertainment industry. It was a very hot debate.
You can read about both on the Linux Journal site. I've written reports that should go up in the next several days. Meanwhile, I can give you the upshot, which comes from remarks made by John Perry Barlow both during and after the second debate. Both Intel and Microsoft, he said, have made their deals with the Hollywood devil, and are embedding Digital Rights Management (DRM) features in future products. Microsoft is doing it through the Palladium initiative, and Intel is doing it through something called LaGrande.
Linux competes in many ways by what it *doesn't* offer, including ways to perpetuate old industries' hold on marketplaces. Just like the Net.
And in the long run, both will succeed for the same reasons.