451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Linux on Wall Street
Raven Zachary, April 24, 2006 @ 11:16 am ETI’m at the Linux on Wall Street Conference today in New York City. The web site lists the conference as “Linux on Wall Street”, but the show guide prominently displays “Linux/Open Source on Wall Street” - a sign of greater diversity. While the exhibition area is dominated by Linux hardware vendors and the big guys (IBM, HP, Intel, Red Hat, Novell, Unisys, Dell, Cisco), there are also a few software vendors - CollabNet, Sybase, Black Duck, ActiveState, and SourceLabs, to name a few. SpikeSource and JBoss are here as speakers, but not exhibitors (I’ll go check out the Red Hat booth and see if there are any JBoss folks hanging out). This one-day conference is in its 4th year.
Linux conferences and magazines are highly dependent on hardware vendors as sponsors/advertisers. What is going to happen in 5-10 years when virtually everyone has migrated to commodity hardware and the new customer acquisition phase is mostly over? Yes, people will continue to upgrade, but I don’t foresee this level of marketing for customer retention. Will services and software vendors pick up the slack, or will we see a reduction in vendor spend as I saw first-hand at LinuxWorld in Boston?
Categories: Conferences, Linux, Software
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This is a hard one. Linux has such an historically “word of mouth” marketing MO that I feel Linux in traditional “get the word out” types of schemes like trade shows, is always pushing a rock up the hill. It’s not how the Linux community has done their marketing, nor is it how they WANT to do their marketing.
However, I think that there’s a bigger issue. Is the Conference mentality of marketing heading petering out in general (not just for Open Source)? I know that many still like the travel boondoggle that comes with going to a trade show (on the participant and the vendor side equally), but is it really the best way to market a product when there is SO much information out in the wild? What with websites, podcasts, blogs, zines, etc, it seems to me that viral marketing is ramping up for a peak as the key type of marketing in the next few years.
Thoughts?
Wow , Linux and Linux market. I agree with you on the Linux beeing dependent on hardware vendors as sponsors/advertisers.
This is a great post.
Bela at Buy, Sell, Trade Market
Great post with lot of work. Thanks.