How to waste a lot of money

Yesterday we went to IBM´s Software Day 2007. This is an invitation IBM makes to key people in large coporate organizations, IT professionals and media, where they try to explain why buying one of their excellent but extremely expensive business solutions is a must inside their companies. This is usually a big event, where they spend a lot of money, but if things go well, they can pay all the event with just one new client.

Unfortunately things didn´t go to good. The invitation was at 6 PM, a time when most of the people are starving after work, luckily I´m not most of the people and had a muffin at a coffee shop 30 minutes before, because there was nothing to eat before the event, just natural juice.

The first demo – which was supposed to take 25 minutes – took 45 minutes and was terrible. Instead of using a test server and logging from the event to show some real demonstration it was a crappy fake image over html demo. In 45 minutes they didn´t say anything worth, my buddy Juan Pablo part of ChileHardware Staff works over Rational Software – which was the demo about – and almost cried. The product is excellent but they made it look like crap.

After this demo we went out for a coffee break, and trust me, it was really a coffee break, only coffee. This was 8 PM, and still nothing to eat, considering the event was going really bad and we where starving we decided to leave. I may respect a company that makes an event with a great product on a low budget, what I cannot understand is a company that makes an crappy event with no food spending a huge amount of money.