CeBIT 2009: 1st day - The Evening

My feeling about theis CeBIT are a little bit mixed. I had some great discussions today with customers, many questions and i had enough to do, so i didn´t felt bored for a second. And our management talked about an all-in-all successful day. At the moment i don´t really have an idea how to transform the discussions in the univeral currency of trade shows in regard of measuring performance. Creating leads is difficult, many discussions are with people just asking “How is Solaris different to Linux? Why should I use it?”. While many want to try it, you can´t make a lead out of it. On my way back to Hamburg i just decided to ignore all this lead-generation stuff for most of the disussions and try to evanglize as much as possible for Solaris. But i was a little bit shocked on the other hand: The aisles in the CeBIT are wide and many booth looks like being planed for a much smaller area and now they doesn´t know how to use the larger amount of space. Unused space everywhere albeit they used some blocking elements so you you have no insights to this areas. I can´t help but i have the feeling that this year is clearly a crisis CeBIT: Two years ago the train station at Hannover Fairgrounds was filled with people … this time it was no problem to get a place at a table to type some lines about the CeBIT. No problems to get a seat -yes , a seat - in the bus shortly after 18:00.
By the way, dear Deutsche Bahn: Please repair the electronic time table at the train station. It´s a terrible business card for our country, when some lines of aren´t functional at all and many letters just display any letter, but not the correct one. Well … i hope the following days will bring more visitors to CeBIT.