ITEC Thanks

[Leo Mauler]

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 at 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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