The Cowtown Chronicles

No, not a picture this time — my hotel room isn’t as good as it was in January for Macworld — just a quick note on perspective and a little bit of introspection on what it is I’m doing here.

I’ve been flipping through the handouts that came in my SWAG bag, and I don’t know if I’ve seen so many buzzwords collected in one place, ever. The enterprise tech market seems to be a roiling sea of companies all trying to simultaneously cannibalize each other’s sales while forming groups to work together for interoperability. My impression so far is that they’re all run by marketers looking for the “next big thing.”

How about this for a “next big thing”? Make products that make my life TRULY easier. I don’t know for sure what exactly I mean by that, I’m still new to the space, but I can’t imagine that every mid-sized company needs yet another “dashboard” to help manage their “private cloud.” I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that there might be fewer than 500 companies (most regularly listed in a particular edition of Fortune magazine, I’d guess) that truly need something like that. Is that tiny market worth all the trouble you go to trying to reach it?

Anyway, I’m here to absorb all of it that I can, which means that I’ll have to figure out a way to translate buzzwords into something that is actually useful in my environment. I’ll also need to sift through all the cruft on the show floor for the truly informative and helpful info. Even for a guy who’s pretty good at BS detection like myself, this is a daunting task.

Nevertheless, I’m excited to be here, and I’m looking forward to learning more about this technology. I think it’ll be really useful to me in the future, and I hope that I can put the knowledge I gain to good use for TCU.