The X alternative makes waves in the desert

"Scott McNealy Doesn’t Want Your Money," read the giant banner, which covered the entire side of the parking garage across the Las Vegas Convention Center. At least until the final day of Comdex, when someone …. pulled a prank and overnight covered up the letters "n’t" in "doesn’t."

McNealy and his Sun Microsystems company have not had much of a presence at any previous Comdex show. McNealy raised a lot of eyebrows for stepping into the "lion’s den" with a heavy doze of anti-Microsoft messages and hype promoting Sun’s StarOffice software suite which is available free from Sun’s Web site. Sun also gave away tens of thousands of CDs with the StarOffice suite of business productivity applications for the Windows, Linux and Unix platforms.

McNealy gave a keynote address on the third day of Comdex in which he blasted Bill Gates and Microsoft in no uncertain terms and with a harshness that clearly brought out his deep resentment of Microsoft and its predatory business model. Even McNealy conceded the rather bitter nature of his demeanor. "This speech was supposed to be an example of a kinder, gentler Scott McNealy, but I guess not."

McNealy went on the attack against Microsoft saying O2K (Office 2000) and W2K (Windows 2000) pose a greater threat to the computer industry then Y2K. "Of the top 10 best-selling PC software programs, five are needed to undo or fix what you did with the other five." But McNealy also incorporated some humor into his comments regarding the competition. "I don’t hate Windows PCs … they keep people off the streets and off drugs."

On the other hand, Web appliances and machines running Java are infinitely simpler and that will drive their demand and popularity. "My 2-year-old can operate a set-top box. These new devices are so easy that you don’t have to worry whether your kid is computer-literate … unless they’re sitting behind a Windows PC." McNealy said he wants the computer industry to follow the same model as in the telephone industry where consumers and business users don’t know, or care what operating system runs the telephone. They just expect them to work. "We buy into the notion that information ought to be a utility that is just as easy to operate as water or power."

Unlike most keynote speakers, McNealy did address the Microsoft antitrust case and said he thinks Microsoft will be forced to break up. "If I were a betting person, I'd say they are going to break them up." To avoid that, the minimum requirements for a settlement would require Microsoft to agree to transparent pricing, be prevented from making exclusionary agreements, be forced to open up application programming interfaces, and be forbidden from investing its "monopoly money" in intellectual property and in its customers. "All I want Microsoft to do with their monopoly cash is give it back to the shareholders or put it back into R&D and innovate for once in their life. I have said that if the government can't see Microsoft agreeing on these issues then maybe they've got to go structural," McNealy said referring to a forced breakup.

McNealy’s anti-Microsoft vision was also preached in keynote speeches by the chief executives of the leading distributors of the Linux operating system. "No one buys operating systems. People buy applications. Our opportunity is to build the killer apps of the 21st century, not to re-invent them," said Red Hat CEO Robert Young. Added Caldera CEO Ransom Love, "No single company should control a standard, and this is essential for the adoption of Linux (which is Open Source based). Microsoft’s questionable business practices have caused a desire for alternatives. Linux plays as an application server, thin server, and soon as a specialized high-end server." Caldera, Love said, is targeting corporate IS managers, ISPs and value added reseller.

Linus Torvalds, the father of the Linux movement also drew a packed audience in his keynote address in which he told the 7000+ attendees that software, rather than hardware is moving to become the prevailing driver of technology. "Hardware is no longer being developed at the pace it was years ago. High-end hardware will innovate more slowly as devices and platforms shrink." Linux, he said will increasingly become the operating system of choice in the booming market for Internet appliances because the software has virtually no cost, is highly scalable to any kind of device and is far more reliable than competing solutions. One example of such Linux-based applications was shown by Axis Communications which launched the Axis 2100 network video camera ($500), a camera that has its own IP address and built-in Linux-based Web server so it can be controlled remotely over a network or even over the Internet. Unlike other digital video cameras, the Axis system doesn’t require a personal computer. Set up in a store, a storeowner can access the Axis camera and "look around" in his facility from virtually any location.

The excitement surrounding the Linux movement was the first major attempt at an open rebellion in what has traditionally been a Windows love fest since the Apple-Motorola-IBM alliance tried ­ and failed -- to up-end the Wintel standard with the PowerPC architecture. One of the popular sections of Comdex was the Linux Business Pavilion where more than 100 companies exhibited a variety of flavors of the Linux operating system ("distributions") as they are called, along with a growing number of Linux-based servers and business-oriented applications software. Well over 75,000 people visited the Linux Pavilion. As a sign of how quickly Linux is developing as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Windows NT/2000, especially on the server side of the computing network architecture, next year’s pavilion will be twice as large and the space was all but sold-out by the end of last week’s show. That cannot be said for the rest of Comdex, which is suffering from a rather dramatic decline in exhibitor participation, although the Ziff-David group that owns the show has so far denied the trend. The proof lies in the large exhibit areas that were not used for this year’s show and several large areas in other halls being sparsely populated with booth of non-revenue-producing "visitor service" areas.