VMworld: Oi, no sneaky meetings!

Blog GCG staff were summarily kicked out of the VMworld press and analyst area this morning. Our crime? Trying to have a short meeting with an industry contact while sitting inside the cordoned-off analyst/press corral. Last year, and in years past, we routinely took briefings in this area with no trouble.

The problem was that our contact didn’t have a press/analyst badge, and he was sitting on the forbidden side of the divide. I proposed a workable solution – moving the table a couple of feet so that his chair would be on the other side of the rope barrier, while we sat legally inside the designated area. That wasn’t acceptable. I guess it violated the spirit and sanctity of the press/analyst area.

This doesn’t sound like a huge problem, and in the scheme of things, it really isn’t. But given that there were 17,000 people wandering around the convention center at the time, there wasn’t any place we could sit down and talk, much less talk semi-privately.

Industry events like VMworld give us the opportunity to meet one to one with executives, product managers, and all sorts of smart folks from the vendor and customer communities. This is vital to us; this is how we get the lowdown on new stuff and find out what’s happening in the real world of computing.

It’s in VMware’s best interest to facilitate this process, not hinder it. It makes for happier reporters and analysts – and it keeps us from using a blog to vent our gripes instead of talking about VMware stuff.