“Finally, we come to Best of Show. Traditionally, the Best of
Show award is given to one of the winners in another category, but
this time that seemed plain wrong. The real news of Comdex was the
Linux Business Exposition. In a sense, the real news about the
Linux Business Exposition — what I called the Linux pavillion in
previous reports — was that there was a Linux pavillion. You only
had to go over there to see the excitement.”
“But granted that Linux was somehow the most important action at
this show, who gets an award? There are many varieties of Linux,
and many Linux products. There’s hardware and software,
applications and utilities, as well as flavors of the operating
system. On reflection, we decided that the proper recipient of the
award is the Linux Business Exposition itself.”
“Thus, I handed the Byte.com award for Best of Show at
Comdex/Fall 99 to Sonny Suslow, the emperor penguin and general
business manager of the Linux Business Expo for
Softbank/Ziff-Davis. We first gave the award to my lovely assistant
— the Penguin Systems penguin. She passed it on to Sonny. It
seemed symbolically correct.”