After the keynotes, the Enterprise 2.0 Demo Pavilion opened. While wandering around, I was struck by how few of the stands stood out. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be, since it’s hard to imagine a crowd in which every member stands out.)
The typical vendor had a catchy name, and sometimes a tagline. But the typical tagline translated fairly directly to “Enterprise 2.0,” and that’s what we all, vendors and otherwise, were there for. Then again, maybe the purpose of a stand is to make yourself available to people who already know about you, and decided to visit you before they got to the conference.
If I had any brilliant and original ideas about demo stands, I’d put them here. But I can only remark that a large, prominently-placed stand and the chance to get or win some stuff usually works well, and that Microsoft were ahead of me on that one.
The title of this post contains a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure, the text-based game. I point this out because I probably have readers who have never played it or any other text-based game, and who have never been in “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.”
I’m not implying that the vendors were all twisty and little. If you followed the link in the first paragraph, you’ll see that they included some rather large organizations. As for twisty, the point of this post is that few of them managed to make clear their distinctive twist on Enterprise 2.0.