Reflections from Networld Interop
It's been a long time since I've been to a reasonably well know trade show and seen as few people as this one. I didn't hear the final numbers but it couldn't have been the 40,000 that they were predicting. I'd be suprised if they had 20,000.
David Strom had a good quote in his Web-informant newsletter (you can subscribe here: http://www.strom.com/awards/index.html)- "the show floor was so quiet you could hold your own religious service." Amen to that. Microsoft even managed to show up without their Windows 2003 Server trial CDs. They were supposed to be there on Wednesday but I didn't manage to get one. They did have a Office 2003 Beta 2 Kit with lots of good stuff in it including a Windows 2003 Server RC2 disk.
I had a visit with IBM to see some of their new servers. They had one setup with a high end server running VMware using it as a virtual cluster machine to provide redundant backup for other independent servers. I had an interesting discussion with two of the engineering guys about the future of virtual software vendors. IBM has chosen VMware for several reasons but mainly for the features available.
Overall I found the show to be a downer. Many of the products that you would typically find at this show have entered into the commodity phase. While the whole area of wireless seems ready to explode there wasn't anything that really jumped out at me. The giveaways were pretty slim too!
9:34:59 PM 
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