More on Novell's cheeky tricks at Red Hat show...

More info on the mention I made in an earlier post to the little tricks that vendors get up to at a rival's conference.

I'm over in Boston at the moment reporting on Red Hat's annual shindig which the Linux specialist claims has had the most attendees of the four events it has held thus far- not bad going considering the state of the US economy – or maybe the Linux fans here just don't have anything better or anything at all to do, like a job for example. (But then the fees aren't cheap so I guess the attendees need to be employed or independently wealthy to afford to come here)

Anyway, rival Novell wasn't going to let Red Hat have things all its own way, and as I pointed out in an earlier post, has hung a massive banner extolling the virtues of Suse Linux right outside the main entrance to the Red Hat show.



Chatting to new Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst, which I am in the process of writing up, it turns out that Novell had more than just the banner planned.

Me: We saw the cheeky little banner that Novell managed to hang outside the conference…

Whitehurst: You like that…you should have seen the big floor thing they had. They had a big sticker on the floor but it turns out…not sure who had rights to that area but it wasn't supposed to be there so it's gone.

Red Hat PR minder: Cheeky, that's a very nice way to put it…very diplomatic.

This is not the first time that I've seen this kind of behaviour. Back in the late 1990s when the Outlook vs Notes war was raging, Microsoft decided to hold its Outlook conference in Boston, which also happened to be the stopping ground of Lotus, maker of Notes. Lotus hired a fleet of vans embossed with its logo to drive round and around the Microsoft exhibition to show the Redmond boys it wasn't going to take such provocation lying down. Juvenile but amusing.