Last year at this time, I was at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. The show was then attempting to blend the "Next-Generation Data Center" in with the normal Linux-ish exhibits. Last year, a month after LinuxWorld ended, I was contacted by a show staffer who badgered me for over an hour. She wanted to know what they should do with this conference. I talked a lot, as I usually do. She seemed very interested.
Today, I understood the call. In the desperate struggle to keep this show alive, its organizers were clinging to any and all ideas. And as it turns out, they went with all of those ideas at once. Today was the first day of the Open Source World / Next Generation Data Center / Cloud somethingorother / Dice Job fair, expo and conference in San Francisco. It was like a leperous zombie conference: trying to eat everyone's brains at once, but all the while losing useful appendages. The expo floor was a tiny hovel of non-decision-makers, job-seekers and 70-year-old conference tourists.
Last year, LinuxWorld was a quiet little get-together of small data center companies, some storage players, a few phone companies, and a gaggle of open-source projects. There was an on-site install festival, where old computers were fixed and reinstalled with Ubuntu to be given to charities and schools. Slashdot even showed up.
This year, there was only Ubuntu, Dell and FreeBSD. [As an aside: am I wrong in associating FreeBSD users with motorcycles, leather and Jack Daniels?] A number of other small companies struggled to get interested attendees to stand and listen. But for the most part, this was an empty show that everyone in attendance found highly unsatisfying. The vendors had no customers. The speakers had no users to talk to. And through it all, a poor contingent of unemployed attendees (who got in free) mingled from booth to booth passing out resumes. Not what you want when you're at a show trying to sell cloud services to decision makers!
Today's show was a complete waste of time for all involved. The only good thing about it was that, due to pricing constraints, the speakers lounge and press center were in the same room. That was awesome, and every show should do that. It made for great conversation.
I think I know what happened, however, to make this show go wrong. Two weeks ago, O'Reilly held their OSCON in San Jose. It's usually in Portland, Ore. OSCON was a great show with lots of good talks. That event was a shotgun blast to the zombie conference that LinuxWorld has become.