Its the Friday morning after a 3 day show in Boston. Its nice today to not have a show to rush off to, to stand on my feet and be uncomfortable in clothing I positively hate, and to have be polite. I am usually a polite, nice, and reasonable guy; but the levels of politeness often raise to a abnormal and unreal high during a tradeshow. I do have a simple request for IDG.
Please move the show back to New York!
Its not that Boston is terrible, evil, or anything. Its just that more exhibitors of the BIG kind went to New York and they always go to the SF show. The guys I counted as missing were IBM, Sun, and HP. I bet a lot of the smaller startups out on the “left coast” are also MIA.
My overall feeling about the show is that its smaller here in Boston. Perhaps one could call it more personal; but in reality the crowds were less, the sheer number of exhibitors were less, and buzz about new stuff was less. Since the LWE is truly a corporate and enterprise play these days, at least put the show in its true venue guys. It belongs in places where it can do that mission. At least the (dot) orgs were not on a separate floor this year in Boston. But at the end of the show, I was talking with a Senior manager of Compaq. No, not HP. Those guys don’t admit to being part of HP. To them HP is another thing to struggle through. He applauded the existance of the (dot) orgs but we both agreed they should be in the exact center of the show floor and not on the end. Without those guys, where would Linux actually be? We assuredly need all the corporate interest; but things are powered by the community. So, my message to IDG for Linuxworld SF is to do the right thing with the orgs.
Another thing that will happen this year yet again at the SF show is the glorious Linuxcare Labs reunion lunch that we have each year. I manage to find a new super secret guest each year and I have a few months yet to plan the lunch for this year. The main thing at the lunch is reveling in the years past and talking with good old friends and ex co-workers about those amazing, fun, and crazed days when we started a business unit at this starcrossed entity called Linuxcare. I think people that have never started a business unit have a romantic belief it just springs up like a flower in fast forward mode in well-tilled soil. Not so. It takes watering, time, sun, some care. It also takes a fair amount of effort to birth a thing.
In my current work situation I have also been asked to birth a few things like a new combined entity. I’m surprised that most people believe since a person of authority proclaimed that the groups combined to form a new entity that all of the background BS is just taken care of by the person’s proclamation and we are ready to go tackle real-world problems. There are the core things around how the group will function, operate, how organization works, etc. How we get something called a “budget”. Anyways, those are all my concerns and I don’t really mean to trot them out to my folks; but I get a bit pissed off when people believe things just happen with little or no effort on anyone’s part.
Anyways, closing out the show thing and not varying too far from the post; I think the LWE Boston was not a failure. Its never a failure when I get to do a new thing like volunteer to work with the FSG and LSB and get a thing that I’m personally excited about doing. I also met up with a few old friends which was very nice. I do hope that IDG in all its glory rethinks a few things. But the current bet is that they won’t. They don’t seem to be strong on the thinking side.
