In what I believe is the last RedMonk Radio podcast, my colleagues Cote and James were interviewed by Scott Mark on the subject of what the life of an industry analyst is like. One of the subjects discussed was travel. As James said, the travel is – depending on your temperament, of course – a real negative at times.
For my part, travel is far and away my least favorite aspect of this job. Nothing else – not even ghost writing whitepapers – comes close. It’s not that I don’t like visiting new places and seeing people, it’s that I honestly enjoy being at home, and spending time with the people in my life. While travel can seem exotic if you don’t do it a lot, the unfortunate fact of life is that with our time being very much in demand, most of my travel these days precludes me seeing anything more than the inside of hotel conference rooms.
Every now and again, however, there’s an exception, and I’m happy to say that today’s panel was one of those. At the kind invitation of the folks from Allegis Capital, who contacted me at the suggestion of ActiveGrid’s Peter Yared (thanks again, sir), I had the opportunity to visit the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay on the occasion of Allegis’ Annual Meeting. Forget the hotel itself, which while nice is no more impressive than a lot of the places we’re put up (nice hotels is about the only real perk we have). The location, however, is unbeatable; as you can see from the picture, the Pacific is right outside my window – I’m listening to it as I write this. So as an instructive note to people who’d like me to participate in their events: put me up on the water somewhere, and I’m likely to attend 😉
What of the actual event? I can’t speak for the audience, though they seemed mostly engaged and interested, but I had a lot of fun. The other panelists (Bernard Gallet – CTO/co-founder of Adisem, Jean-Louis Gassée – Allegis partner and founder of Be, Reid Hoffman – CEO of LinkedIn and former EVP of PayPal, Brad Horowitz – VP Product Strategy Group GoogleZ Yahoo (apologies to brad for screwing that up), and the aforementioned Peter Yared – founder and CEO of ActiveGrid) had a lot to say on the topic of Web 2.0, the fortunes of the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc players, and the investment opportunities still remaining. From the comments at dinner, I’d qualify our panel as a success, and my principal measure for that – the volume and quality of questions – would seem to validate that belief.
Tomorrow, I’ll be heading into San Francisco to spend some time with a few of our customers, but if you’ll be in the area feel free to drop me a line. Also look for a longish note on Debian and other Linux distributions either tomorrow or Friday – just in time for Debconf 🙂
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