> Some of the major vendors felt that there were too many events, ... > LinuxWorld Boston was just not worthwhile. Neither HP nor IBM had a > booth. > Normally, both have large booths and are major event sponsors.
IBM had a briefing suite upstairs in the LinuxWorld show with their own track. And IBM did have a "partners booth" area that was stamping "passports", so IBM was in the exhibit hall too, they just didn't have a booth big enough to house a Maddog talk this year. They were supporting the event in their own way.
The article mentions that the two vendors colluded to skip the show.
"Collusion" is a loaded word. I'm not sure who they mean, as IBM _was_ there as I noted above. I asked my HP salesman about HP having boycotted and instead held a competing function for existing HP customers at another nearby hotel during the tutorial-day. I castigated him for his firm not supporting the conference like a responsible vendor. Since I'm an architect-type at a major customer that does business with all his competitors, he needed to un-ruffle feathers. He said they'd been told that if they wanted onto the show floor, since they were a top-tier company, they would be expected to sign up as Platinum Conference Sponsors. They choked at the mandatory sponsorship surcharge being tacked onto just buying a booth, instead of "if you upgrade to Platinum, we'll double your booth size and give you a 'free' reception room in addition to plastering your logo all over the place" as is / was more common.
I thought the choice of the new conference center hurt their chances of attracting attendees.
The new conference center had an early-adopter problem that the attached hotel isn't open until next month. It killed MacWorld Boston fast that way too. The show certainly LOOKS smaller in the new bigger conference center. Some of that is some companies having smaller or partner-only or no presence -- and I'm thinking not just of the big obvious ones but a certain O'Reilly-competitor was in a 10' booth in 2006 instead of a 20' in 2005, and I think O'Reilly may have had less floor space too, although still 3-4x the smaller presses. In 2005 there was more "open space" on the floor, with lounges and email centers, and the Sun gaming pavilion, none of which were "sales" space. The total rented exhibit floor booth space likely would measure out less too, but I haven't compared exhibitor floor drawings.
It's a real disappointment; there's a lot of Open Source activity in New England and not having a show lowers its visibility.
Open source is by it's nature at least less-, and sometimes non-, commercial. The big- money for-profit folks leveraging FLOSS for their investors' profit are going to send more folks from HQ to a local show -- that's in SF -- than a sleep-away show, both as buyers and as sellers, which is self-enhancing loop: more customers, more marketing guys show up. Who has a big marketing arm in Boston? Data General? DEC? Wang? Lotus? Oops, wrong decade. We even lost our computer games company. Boston has major biotech shows now. I'll miss LinuxWorld Boston because I don't get travel $$ to go to away conferences. I can expense registration as training, and I can expense mileage to training, but I can't expense airfare and room and meals. (The PHB's & bean-counters know *their* "conferences" are booze-filled waste of time, so assume mine are. So they go the theirs and forbid me to go to mine, even though sending me to OSCON or YAPC would actually help the firm. *sigh*) Maybe I'll have to go to Usenix Boston next year as my #1 conference :-/. In Boston/NewEngland we've got lots of FLOSS contributors and projects and skunkworks projects using FLOSS to help our firms/clients, but we don't have the big marketing departments or big big customers. (My firm has major IT budget, but I spent more time at the show than central IT EA.) We'd have a better shot at a developers-and-geeks OSCON style conference here than a marketing glitz show. Some year we'll get our act together and host YAPC in Boston. If that goes over well we could consider trying to throw a OSCON-EAST, but that would be a lot of work -- would need deep committee drawn from _all_ the LUGs and *UG's from the rest of LAMP. -- Bill [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
