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TORONTO, CANADA - "Would you like a free Internet Explorer 5.0 CD?" asked an eager staffperson in the Microsoft booth. My response: "Does it run on Linux?" I just had to ask.
Leaving behind the puzzled expression on his face, I continued to wander through the huge Microsoft booth that was part of Windows World, which was running concurrently with Comdex Canada. (Comdex Canada was in the North Hall, Windows World and Networld+Interop were in the South Hall.)
I found myself at one of Microsoft's booth theatres just before a demo was to start for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. Why not check it out, I thought. The speaker went through the obligatory Microsoft marketing info at the beginning - and then started discussing the different versions of Windows 2000 that will be available. When he got to the "Datacenter Server" version, which will be available sometime in mid-2000, he was very excited about the fact that this version would support 2 nodes. The speaker was extremely proud of the fact that "I've actually seen a 5-node cluster working!"
Uh... um... hello? Gee, there's this little project within the Linux community called Beowulf that started with 16 nodes back in 1994 and now has people using clusters of several hundred machines! Between Beowulf and the Extreme Linux effort, Linux is light-years ahead of where Microsoft seems to be going with NT... oh, excuse, me, Windows 2000. (In fairness, Microsoft defines clustering different than we do with Beowulf - MS is talking about failover capabilities.)
Despite enjoying the speaker's Canadian accent, I finally just couldn't stand the empty sales pitch and got up to leave. Besides, Corel was about to start a demonstration of Word Perfect 8 for Linux.
Being a Canadian company, it was only natural that Corel had a very large show floor presence as well. I particularly enjoyed the fact that they positioned their demo stand for Word Perfect for Linux directly facing the Microsoft booth. Corel booth staff confirmed that they had done this as a deliberate tweak. Hey, when you're spending this much money, why not have a little fun with it, eh?
Wendy Lowe, a product specialist with Corel, began a great presentation on Word Perfect for Linux to a standing-room only crowd. She worked the crowd well and had us yelling "LINUX ROCKS MY WORLD!" at a volume that I'm sure could be heard in the adjacent Microsoft booth.
I'll confess that I'd previously downloaded and installed the free "download" version of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, but primarily just because someone had sent me some WP files that I needed to open. I hadn't really used it at all.
But that will be changing... as I left the demo very impressed! I can understand now why Corel has had over 1,000,000 downloads since mid-January, with 100,000+ of those people using it for more than 90 days and registering the software. It is quite powerful and easy-to-use! I was particularly impressed by some of the import/export features, the "click-anywhere-and-start-typing" feature, and some of the web editing capabilities. (For long-time WP users, they do still have "Reveal Codes.") The drawing and charting tools also looked very useful and easy to use. (Granted, this was a demo by a skilled user!)
Sadly, I didn't win the "Personal Edition" they were giving away, which has more features than the free downloadable version. Visit their comparison page to understand all the differences.
Further wanderings brought me to the Adobe booth, where I once again continued to whine about the lack of FrameMaker support for Linux, and how the only reason I have to dual-boot my machine into Windows was for FrameMaker, etc., etc. The Adobe rep. I spoke with gave the party line, which is essentially, "We have no current plans to port FrameMaker to Linux but will continue to watch how that market matures."
But then another representative in the Adobe booth said something that absolutely floored me:
"What someone needs to do is write a really good GUI for Linux?
And this sales rep. was from SGI! (In Adobe's booth demo'ing Adobe products on SGI's Visual Workstation, which runs NT.)
I was speechless... which is a very rare condition for me!
Quicker than you could say KDE or GNOME, I whipped out the slick little Sony VAIO 505 that Linuxcare equips all its travellers with and proceeded to give the two reps. a brief guided tour of Linux GUI capabilities and strengths. The SGI rep's comment at the end was "I stand corrected!" and then he proceeded to tell me how SGI would soon be doing massive things with Linux. (But obviously they need to do a bit more education of their sales force, eh?)
I continued to wander around the booths and saw some interesting networking tools and products, although I found that several of the vendors listed in the Comdex guide as having UNIX products, were actually creating products allowing Windows users to connect to UNIX/Linux servers via X-Windows or telnet. In this category, Hummingbird had a large floor presence showing off products such as their Exceed PC X-server.
And then there was Attention! Software, who was listed as having a UNIX product. They do. It's a client for their server software that will trigger pager or cell-phone alerts when there is a problem with a Linux or UNIX machine (on which the client is installed). The issue is that their server software runs only on Windows NT. Which created a rather fun conversation...
The Attention! representative had a very hard time understanding that my company had no Windows NT servers on our network. (Uh... we're Linuxcare... we do 24x7 support for Linux... we might have an NT box lurking somewhere to test connectivity problems clients may have... but all of our desktops and servers are running Linux!) He said quite strongly, "Are you planning to stay in this job for the rest of your life? If not, you will need to know NT for your next one!!"
Uhhh... no. At this point, I took great pleasure in informing him that I'm an MCSE who has worked with UNIX for 13 years and NT for 3 years, and that I left the NT world because I longed for the stability and security I'd had within the UNIX realm. He was a bit surprised and we had a pleasant discussion speculating on the future of NT and Linux.
Of course, if the primary purpose of your product is to page people when things go wrong with your servers, I can certainly understand why the rep. might be biased toward other operating systems where servers crash more often!
At 2pm I made it over to Evan Leibovitch's Comdex presentation entitled LINUX: The Alternative OS?. It was the only presentation on the entire Comdex agenda that dealt with Linux, outside of Bob Young's keynote speech. Before a crowd of about 70 people, Evan did an excellent job of laying out why Linux is a true alternative and discussing both strengths and weaknesses of the o/s. It was a humorous and well-done speech. I picked up a few pointers that I intend to use in speeches of my own! (In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that Evan and I both work closely together on the Linux Professional Institute, so any review I write of him is bound to be a bit biased.)
On the subject of speeches, I finished up day 3 of Comdex Canada giving a presentation on Linuxcare and "Cutting Through The Hype" of Linux. It was back in the Linux pavilion in front of a standing-room only crowd in the booth theatre. Lots of good questions and a lot of fun.
All in all, an enjoyable and interesting show. As I've said before in my other reports, the folks from the Canadian Linux Users Exchange (CLUE) really deserve great recognition for all they did to pull off the Linux Pavilion. Evan Leibovitch, Matt Rice, Dana Epp and the other CLUE directors organized the effort, but a crew of volunteers were on hand to keep the demo tables staffed at all times.
Here are some more pictures of the show, taken with an older Sony Mavica digital camera (MVC-FD7) with 640x480 resolution:
