Back from OracleWorld
Sorry for the hiatus - spent last week in San Francisco at OracleWorld.
Attending a competitor's convention was an interesting thing. I expected people to be neutral to hostile, and nothing could be farther from the truth. Everyone who came by was agreeably surprised that we had a presence there. To be sure, we were concentrating on how we interoperate with Oracle with Windows and the .NET Framework, rather than promoting SQL Server, but still it was nice to see. People were lining up 30+ deep to win copies of Windows Server 2003, and the only negative thing I heard was about the lack of sessions on .NET development. Amazing how many people were already involved with MS in some way - MSDN subscribers, MS Partners of some stripe, or simply MS customers using one or more of our products in a heterogenous environment.
The other interesting thing was the number of women there, something I always notice. Compared to similar events I've been to, there were a lot more, I'm guessing maybe 25%+ of the attendees just from eyeballing it. I'm hoping our booth organizer can get me actual demographic figures. If my guesstimate is right, I'd be curious to know why that's so. It might be that there are more women in the targeted levels/roles for the conference, but if it is more generally true for the technology as a whole I'd love to investigate what they are doing right to attract women to their platform.