I'm honestly trying to weed out at least some useful info while attending a seminar on service-oriented architecture. I'm not sure why they are doing this to people... Noise-to-value ratio is about 95-to-5. And the 95 percent of the noise is not just the white noise you can simply ignore. It's into-your-face marketing. There's an exhibitor floor, which is where the marketing should reside, but the marketing is leaking... no, it's floating into the conference rooms.

Here’s an example of  what the meeting organizers did: they’ve titled a particular session by using a generic technical topic, but the presentation actually started with a vendor introducing their product implementing this particular architecture, then an investor explained why they've invested into this vendor, and finally, a  business client of this vendor told us how they implemented this software.

It's really sad...

I do not mind marketing, but why did we have to pay even a penny to attend this event, if its organizers are paid already by selling the exhibition space to the vendors and letting the vendors promote their products in the conference rooms?

Registration has to be free!

Anyway, I was able to make this seminar useful for myself by stopping by the vendor tables and talking to their technical representatives. May be this is the right way to go? Just register for a show that has vendors presenting technologies you’re interested in, and talk to them about these technologies at their tables. Yes, they will ask for  your business card. Yes, their goal is to sell you their product, but at least you’ll have a chance to talk to a knowledgeable technical person who will be able to answer your questions.

posted Monday, 27 February 2006