I think that free CDs coupled with a prominent demonstration machine really helped bring people into the booth. Being able to point to a "piece of crap PC" (as Monty and I referred to the PIII-600Mhz demonstration machine) running Linux really made the difference to people looking at costly upgrades for other OSes.

There were a couple of presentations on the subject of upgrading to Windows Vista which gave us a bit of a boost in the numbers of people at our booth. I'm not sure which Wednesday presentation covered the costs of upgrading to Vista, but on Thursday there was a SolutionBuilder presentation (one of those $200 fee presentations) titled "Window of Opportunity: Getting Ready for Windows Vista Business".

Attendees from the Windows Vista presentations gave us possible reasons why they would suddenly be interested in Linux. One attendee to the presentations said he was told his price tag to upgrade to Windows Vista was $5000 per seat (upgrading the hardware, the OS, and the software (such as Exchange)). Another attendee said that Windows Vista requires a video card with 256MB video RAM (included in the above $5000 estimate). Contrast this with the 8MB video RAM card in the demonstration machine in the KCLUG booth. This certainly would explain the sudden interest in Linux on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.

What was really interesting was the number of people who were already running Linux on their servers or their company's servers. A childhood friend of mine was already running Slackware Linux on the servers of the school district for which he worked (as he put it, "we were tired of getting hacked"). Others already ran Linux in their businesses or on home computers.

Business really is the key for widespread acceptance of Linux. The IBM PC and Microsoft OSes first caught on in business, and employees using these computers in their businesses used their experiences to make the decision to bring a computer into their homes and small businesses. If enough businesses start using Linux, employees with an interest in forgoing problems in Microsoft OSes as well as avoid the looming application subscription fees, will seriously consider Linux as an alternative in their home systems.

--- "Christopher A. Bier" chris.bier@cymor.com wrote:

Thanks to all who helped with the ITEC booth this year. From what I saw, our booth was one of the most popular.

Chris

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