Inside Novell's BrainShare 2004

Novell's annual event features Hagar, Linus & Star Trek Fans

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH  MARCH 25, 2004

This week I had the pleasure of attending BrainShare 2004, Novell, Inc.'s annual world conference.  I was there along with a customer presenting the project work we've done over the past two years.  Novell creates business software and recently completed the acquisition of a slew of companies that have created products that run on the Linux operating system.  Since the acquisition Novell's stock price has jumped 400%.  A few highlights from the week:

- To get a sense for how technical this crowd is, the Salt Palace dining area had a trivia question on each table (there were hundreds of tables: the event had over 8,000 participants).  One day the question read, and I'm serious:

"We met the Borg for the first time in the second-season episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, "Q Who".  Who was the first person in the episode to say the word Borg?. 

If you know the answer to this question, congratulations, you are officially a Star Trek stud.  The actual answer listed the next day was "Guinan", but I also would have accepted this answer: "No one gives a sh*t". 

- During the keynote address kicking off the event, Novell CEO Jack Messman strutted out Linus (pronounced LEE-nus) Torvalds, the Finnish creator of Linux.  Most of you have no clue who this cat is, but I assure he is big in the techie geek circle.  Bigger than Yoda and Frodo.  Up there with Shatner.  That big.  Anyway, ol' Linus said hello to everyone but sticking to his open source attitude, he really didn't endorse Novell or anything the company is doing (other than using Linux).  He said he didn't regret creating a 'free' product (and thus not being able to directly profit from it).  He added that he does pretty well, and mentioned that he was delivered to the conference on Novell's corporate jet.

- On Wednesday Novell hosted a concert with Sammy Hagar and his band at the Delta Center.  In case you are wondering, the 'band' didn't contain anyone named Van Halen although he did sing a couple VH tracks.  Sammy H. tries to come off like the laid back guy who doesn't care about anything except for having a good time, but I struggle with that when the guy is playing to 5,000 people at a corporate event.  And just like Joe Dirt, I like Van Halen, not Van Hagar.

- Novell is a competitor to Microsoft, and is trying to work with other companies to take the giant down, or at least land a couple body blows.  The strategy is to use Linux as a cheaper, perhaps better and more secure version to the Microsoft products across the board.  The open source community has created a free product that completes with Microsoft Office, including programs that resemble your favorites: Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.  Novell employees were required to download a copy and give it a try.  It's not too bad.