Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Bringing Business Sense to the IT World…

PASS 2005: D+1: HP Keynote

OK, HP, I appreciate that you guys are a major sponsor of the PASS Community Summit, and as such you deserve some general session time.  But come on!  Send us somebody who exudes at least interest, if not excitement about his subject matter.  I'm sure the gentleman who spoke this morning is a nice guy, and is probably a highly valued employee.  He might even be a genius mastermind within your company.  But early-morning presentations are not his strong suit.

The General Session today started at 8:00 AM, which after staying up late at the reception for PASS volunteers, came a bit early.   But hey, no problem, let's dive in and get going.  Provide a dynamic or at least animated person like Microsoft's David Campbell, who presented the second half of this morning's general session, and I'm with you all the way.  And I really enjoyed David's presentations.  He had very few slides, poked fun at some of his own slides, and had a couple of demos.  It was great.  He kept things moving and you can believe that he likes what he is doing.  Unfortunately that was not the case with HP.

In fact, this morning's presentation from HP came across quite a bit like just a sales pitch.  The philosophical quotes were interesting but didn't really seem to fit in.  Using your own company as your primary testimony for cost savings makes me wonder if any other company out there is a client of yours and whether they had any good results, because just using yourself makes me think nobody else has done anything significant.  And quoting your own staff in large print on a slide...what's up with that?  Again, doesn't anyone else have anything good to say about your product?

I'm sorry, but it was just BORING for me.  I know I'm not your immediate target market, but you have no idea what conversations are going on back at my company about the projected growth of our company and systems, or even about the terrabyte of storage that we have been discussing.  I might be able to influence the purchase decision, but I can't recommend your product because I could barely pay attention to the presentation.  I know the Microsoft guys are good at making presentations, and it's hard to compete with them.  So fine, don't compete.  But at least watch and learn.

And the really bad thing is that tomorrow's General Session is another Microsoft / Vendor combination, this time with Dell.  I'd like to hear Jim Gray from Microsoft, and I have higher hopes for Dell, but frankly I'm thinking that it might be a better use of my time to just sleep in tomorrow morning so I'm rested for the other sessions and wrapup.  We'll see...