During the entire Linux World 2005, it is noticeable that Microsoft's booth is right in front and in the middle of the entire trade exhibit hall. They have really loud sounds and videos all throughout. Not only that - they had pretty girls wearing really small Microsoft shirts and they handed out flyers regarding their raffle and one of the prizes was an Xbox.

Great, mutters myself. It has been pretty weird to see Microsoft's name on the program and the banners.

I remember having lunch with Jijo, JM, Zak and two other participants the other day and we were talking about it. Jijo actually wrote on his blog his sentiments, that he was pretty much weirded out by the entire thing. We're using Microsoft's money for an event called Linux World. Quirky isn't it? And during last year's Philippine Open Source Conference, it was pretty much something similar.

I remember seeing on the schedule that there was a speaker on MS Windows and Linux interoperability. Too bad I wasn't able to go there. I think I was in one of the technical seminars. Then again, there were some changes in schedule so I am not very sure if that was even included in the program at all. But seriously, it was pretty odd just to keep on seeing Microsoft everywhere... Well, there were other companies present like WSI, Touch Solutions, Sun Microsystems, Mozcom, etc. But they weren't making as much noise as Microsoft.

Yesterday, the last day, was the grand hurrah at the Microsoft booth. They had the raffle, they had Barbie Almalbis and free Starbucks coffee. Gah...

Very attention getting. We could all learn from them when it comes to grabbing attention alright. How products are packages, how companies are perceived - indeed this is something that advertisers are probably masters of. Tough to compete with a very attention-grabbing booth. And of course they had money to be at the center of it all. PLUG's booth was in one of the far corners of the hall. A small booth where people could have CDs of the distro of their choice could be burned.

How could we compete with such a huge and loud booth?

I remember Manny Amador telling us a story of how they made so much noise waaay back, in one similar occasion. Well, that's one ;) He could do yet another demo of Linux and music, which was his talk the other day. If we had more computers we could also show Revolution OS, which JM and I started watching at the booth the other day and it did get some attention but I had to do something on the computer so we weren't able to finish it. It did draw a small crowd already but, well, I didn't have my laptop with me so I had to quit Mplayer. I mean, in the PLUG booth, we could have some kind of thing like such - FOSS at work :D So that people would just be drawn to it, and soon after that there could be some interaction like a chit-chat about open source, distros on Live CDs and all that. Some of the people who passed by the booth did have questions about Linux, Live CDs, and other open source software matters. And that was pretty good too because some of us who were able to talk to them were able to tell them the merits of FOSS :D

It's just that we had to use Microsoft's money to partly finance the event. The weirdness indeed.