“Fake Steve Jobs” (Dan Lyons) at SugarCRM conference

SugarCRM has their developer conference going on this week in San Jose. Things started with a blast of electric guitar followed by CEO John Roberts’ keynote presentation that reviewed the founding of the company, their strategic bet on open source and plans for the future.

Next up was Fake Steve Jobs –actually Dan Lyons from Forbes. I think Dan is one of the most insightful business writers in tech. He was one of the first business writers to cover open source (though some may argue he doesn’t really grok it; he was snowed by SCO on at least a few occasions.) Nonetheless, Dan’s been following the industry for years and can distinguish between minor ebbs and flows and what turns out to be major seismic shifts like Linux and what Forbe’s calls “the Cheap Revolution”.

Dan saw what was going on with open source software companies like SugarCRM, MySQL, Zimbra and others starting to disrupt the old guard. Perhaps recognizing that there was a similar disruption taking place in traditional print media, Dan decided to start experimenting in blogging and eventually came up with the Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ) blog. Of course, initially no one knew it was Dan writing this. He was finally outted last summer by NY Times columnist Brad Stone as he was finalizing the publication of his satirical novel “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs“.

And perhaps with another parallel to the software industry, Lyons’ blog has gone legit and is now sponsored by Forbes. It’s still completely irreverent and skewers Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and open source others with regularity. You can dismiss FSJ as sophomoric humor, but you’d miss out on the fact that much of his analysis is thought provoking. I don’t agree with everything Lyons writes, but I his observations are pretty sharp. FSJ’s analysis of Microsoft’s offer to acquire Yahoo as a “three legged race” is outstanding. And his send up of Apple’s shutdown of ThinkSecret was inspired. (He’s got Fake Steve Jobs negotiating a possible shut down of his blog with Apple lawyers and it’s all blogged in real time –brilliant!)

So as expected, Dan pretty much slagged off most of the tech industry in his presentation. (One of my SugarCRM buddies referred to it as “equal opportunity bashing.”) No one was spared. He ripped into Larry Ellison (“trying to break Wilt Chamberlin’s record”), Marc Bennioff (“a very modest individual”), Ray Ozzie (“the Ted Bundy of user interface design”). Perhaps more importantly, he talked about how open source is moving beyond the realm of the crusade to become more mainstream.

In print at Forbes and as FSJ, it’s pretty easy to figure out where Dan is serious, where’s he’s being flippant and where he’s using satire to make a point. That wasn’t so easy to discern in his presentation and so it felt off-kilter at times; sort of like standup comedy without alcohol. I managed to record a few clips of the presentation on YouTube.

I have a tremendous respect for Dan as a writer. I’ve written my share of tech satire over the years and it’s tough to do week after week. I hope Dan can keep it up. Both at FSJ and at Forbes.

Update:

And here’s Paul Krill’s report from the SugarCRM Conference including coverage of Jonathan Schwartz’s keynote.