Having been, once again, berated for my somewhat less than stellar blogging career to-date (thanks Jeff!), and now that things back in the UK are beginning to return to normalish levels (whatever that means) - I figured I'd get a quick post out.
There seem to be fairly mixed feelings on the web about SolidWorks World '08 but for my part I think SolidWorks did a darned good job for the most part.
Although the general sessions weren't overly inspiring, two things really did hit me:
First was the session with Theo Jansen during which my bottom jaw spent most of the time on the floor as I watched his "creatures" move around of their own accord. The two tonner was particularly scary.
The second was the emphasis that is being placed by SolidWorks on stability and performance for 2009. I think its great that, instead of overly flashy demonstrations, and lots of "ra ra ra" stuff, there was a very down to earth attitude this year that focused on the very real needs of the user.
Admittedly I am biased, but I thought the partner pavilion was great this year - certainly better than Vegas or New Orleans (this is only my third World) particularly in terms of the number of people that decided to peruse the booths.
Unfortunately, as with last year, Delta decided to lose our bags in Atlanta, unlike last year however they arrived the next day completely in tact, hopefully next year we can graduate to just having our bags at the outset (please guys - conferences are hard enough work without stuff going missing)
The Mariott hotel was great, aside from being a stone's throw from the convention centre, the nearest bar was called DWs - no prizes for guessing the pun, and the view from the room was fantastic:
The block party was fantastic, though in all fairness, I'm bound to say that wherever free food, beer, and music are involved ;-)
On Thursday we held our own reseller event which I hope everyone found useful, one of my favourite bits was having Neil up there talking about his own experiences starting with DriveWorksXpress and moving on to full DriveWorks.
I've said it before and I probably sound like a broken record, but my favourite bit of the whole SolidWorks World affair is getting to meet people - whether Prospects, Customers, Resellers, Partners or the people at SolidWorks themselves. Some of the great people I got to meet this year were Mark Arnett from CAD Graphics West who kindly lent us two machines for our booth, Jeff Sweeney from 3D Vision who despite having a go at me is always a welcome face, Paul Gimbel from Razorleaf who has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Mike Jolly who is our newest certified AE, Boris Shoov, Jim Wilkinson, and Jeremy Regnerus if only fleetingly from SolidWorks - there are a tonne of others, just because you're not on the list above it doesn't mean your not loved! I'm sure it doesn't matter how many people I list, I'm going to get an e-mail from someone saying I've forgotten them :-)
On Thursday afternoon the DriveWorks team (including Neil) packed up and headed over to Denver, Colorado for a team meeting - the kind of team meeting that involved skiing, snowboarding, and a reasonable amount of alcohol. I'm ashamed to say that a fair amount of the alcohol survived the weekend, but by that time the time-zone change had really hit most of us.
Anyhoo, I think this post is quite long enough, hopefully the next one won't be so long coming!
