A Losing Bet: the Last Days of Comdex, Part 1

I had two missions at Fall Comdex. One
was to participate in a
Great
Debate titled :The Computing Re-Revolutionaries: Business,
Consumers, or Both?" The other was to see if it was possible to buy
a Linux desktop of any kind from a major hardware vendor at the
show.I arrived in Las Vegas late Sunday, just in time to miss Bill
Gates' kickoff keynote at the MGM Grand. My debate was scheduled
for 4:30 Monday afternoon, and my plane left at 4:30PM on Tuesday.
That still left plenty of time to carry out the second mission, one
made easy by the absence of several big hardware players and the
fact that Comdex has become a relatively small show. If it weren't
for Microsoft, it would hardly have been a show at all.On that last issue, cabbies were a key source of
intelligence. See, Las Vegas is even more dependent on cab
transportation than is New York. The bus system is handy only for
running up and down the strip. The elevated tram only runs back and
forth between a few hotels. So if you want to get around, cabs
generally are your only choice. As one result, the cabbies of Las
Vegas seem to know more about what's going on there than any other
professional group. They're also more willing to talk about
it.I took cabs twice during my visit there, and both times I got
the same story: 1) Comdex is in big trouble; 2) the show is
shrinking away; and 3)
Key3Media, the
company that puts on the show, is going bankrupt.Meanwhile, Microsoft seems as big and sturdy as ever. The
company also is promoting the hell out of the new TabletPC version
of Windows XP. As a bunch of TabletPCs made their debuts at the
show, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Comdex in its
twilight years has largely become a promotional peripheral of
Redmond. In fact, it's hard to escape the same conclusion about
some of the hardware vendors--even HP.Carly Fiorina, HP's President & CEO, gave the opening
keynote on Monday morning, the first day of the show. The vast room
held thousands, and it was packed to the walls. The keynote was an
hour-long infomercial. Fiorina's only smile came through when her
microphone went dead and then came back on. I'm sure she welcomed a
short break from the relentless promotional message-making.She went on a great deal about partnerships with other large
corporate entities and mentioned Linux only three times. Twice she
said, "You want Windows servers. And UNIX. And Linux." And she said
Cimarron was "the first all-Linux animated
movie." Before that she talked about how HP had ported Dreamworks'
proprietary animation software from their old workstations
(presumably SGIs) to new HPs, under extreme deadline pressure to
produce the movie Shrek. But she but made no
mention of Linux, which was used to render the movie.As the hour drew to a close, it became clear that no more
mentions of Linux were forthcoming, especially after she began
talking generic Solutionese about being "focused on delivering a
consumer technology experience that...", followed by a series of
boilerplate virtues. I was standing at the exit when she closed her
talk by pulling out a Tablet PC and sending a handwritten e-mail to
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, who she said was in the
audience.Suddenly all her earlier talk about "partners" and
"partnership" acquired a meaningful context.The next keynote was at noon and featured Scott McNealy of
Sun Microsystems. This was much less well-attended--partly because
it competed with lunch and partly because the audience had to go
through a security screening process that was completely absent for
the Fiorina keynote.McNealy was relaxed, informative and--as always--funny. While
his general message was no less self-promotional than Carly
Fiorina's, there was nothing scripted about it. He kept his notes
in a pile of blue cards and wandered around the stage issuing one
quip after another.He talked about real-world problems for the hardware
business, such as the reluctance of CFOs to approve spending on
stuff that doesn't pay pack in the same quarter. "The discount rate
that they apply to future cash flow is virtually infinite", he
said. "Put a two-way Intel server on your expense report", is one
strategy he gave for coping with the problem.He said security and complexity were huge customer problems,
and he spread blame the blame for them not only on Microsoft but on
Linux hackers inside companies as well. From my notes: "New strains
of Linux...new kinds of servers everywhere. Departments are
creating their own OS stacks. Everybody is now a sysadmin, writing
their own software, building their own stacks, issuing their own
releases."He said big vendors offer three choices. Microsoft's is
integrated: everything you want, glued together in one sealed-up
mess. IBM's he called "unintegratable", adding "their best of breed
is inbred. Lots of paint to make this sucker work... darken the
skies with IBM global services plumbers and carpenters." Sun's
choice, he said, is "integratable.... OSes, servers,
microprocessors, storage, middleware, languages, tools, services
support, consulting...", all "Lego pieces" you can plug together
with stuff from other companies using open APIs and other open
technologies.He also said Sun's main competition was IBM, not HP. Why?
"Because I don't think printing is at the core of your problem." He
called Dell a company for people who like to buy 10-speed bikes,
unassembled. Yet when show time arrived, Linux was front and
center.First he showed an appliance with a Linux UI. From my notes:
"...running a GNOME windows interface, StarOffice tools...based on
an open-source solution". He also called StarOffice the "biggest
open-source effort", with over a million downloads of the source
and 5.6 million downloads of the binaries, running on 11 platforms
so far. "What other productivity suite runs on 11
platforms?"Next he showed a box from
Pirus, a company Sun
recently acquired. It manages storage across heterogeneous servers,
among other things, and its UI is Red Hat Linux.I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out with
Aaron Swartz, the
16-year-old whiz kid who is the hacker-in-chief of
Creative
Commons, among many other things. Aaron and I were both
participating in the Great Debate.The debate went well, perhaps because it wasn't one.
Everybody had smart stuff to say. I'll give you a full report next
week, along with coverage of a Day Two debate that featured John
Perry Barlow and Richard Stallman vs. three guys from the
entertainment industry. As you might guess, RMS was irrepressible
and things got pretty hot in there.The rest of Day Two was devoted to a Great Linux Hunt that
ended in futility. Two of the big three hardware vendors, Dell and
IBM, weren't at the show. I'm told IBM was off in the Aladdin
Hotel, but I couldn't find them even though I spent both nights
there (nice hotel, by the way; cheap too). Nor was Sony
present.But Toshiba was there, along with HP, Acer and Fujitsu. All
but Acer were within a short walk of the vast Microsoft pavilion,
and all four were pushing their new TabletPCs.It appears from
this
Microsoft release that IBM and Dell aren't making
TabletPCs. Coincidence?All the boxes I saw at all HP, Acer, Fujitsu and Toshiba
booths bore the same sticker that read "designed for WindowsXP".
When I asked a Toshiba guy if it was possible to get a laptop with
Linux, he frostily said, "We don't do that." A Fujitsu guy told me
the same thing but in more friendly terms. At HP a guy told me the
company had recently set up a CTO (configure to order) system on
the web site that would at least allow the customer to get a
desktop or server system configured with Linux. But when he tried
to show me the system at work, he couldn't bring it up. "I told
those guys we needed it up this week!" he said, then invited me to
look at the site after the show was over. He'd be back at the
office by then and able to make sure it was done right.(By the way, I was traveling incognito to these booths,
wearing a badge that read "American Open Technology
Consortium".)For two consecutive Comdexes, Linux had its own big Linux
Business Expo pavilion. Now it was nowhere.But so was Comdex itself. After Microsoft and HP, the biggest
booths were for countries and regions. Taiwan, Hong Kong, France,
the U.K. and Korea were all well-represented but as dull as their
own brochures. Another big booth was Mercedes', which was also
giving test drives in the parking lots. (I just wanted to try the
radios. They all sounded good, but one was crashed--it displayed a
huge "wait"--and all of them had a fancy but user-hostile UI.) By
far the most active booths (to my eyes, at least) were the ones for
Palm and BenQ. Palm had a
whole raft of new stuff to show and sell. And BenQ--a spinoff of
Acer--had a nice assortment of flat-screen monitors and related
peripherals. Olympus had some nice cameras; but the absence of Sony
and Canon seemed even more conspicuous to me.On Monday night, Aaron and I joined some friends at
Showstoppers, where a
small assortment of companies were showing off their stuff to press
folks. With nothing better to do, we got some quality time with
HP's new laptops, all running WindowsXP. These occupied the same
table as the TabletPCs and seemed to be getting about as much
attention.Credit where due: Microsoft has done a very nice job with
screen type; it's much cleaner than what either Aaron or I have
seen from Linux or Apple's OS X. And although the UI is goofy in
that consumer-oriented way (where you have to dumb yourself down a
bit to guess what something must actually mean), it was pretty easy
to figure stuff out. But sadly, it seemed the iron really is
"designed for WindowsXP".But that doesn't change my take-away from the whole show,
which is that cheap rules. Pretty as a lot of this stuff is, the
white boxes are winning. Bet on the generica. Even if it's not on
the tables at Comdex.Doc Searls is senior editor
of Linux Journal.

email: doc@ssc.com