Newton's third Law of presentations

  • Article

"Every reaction to presentation has an equal and opposite reaction" Well I guess I asked for it yesterday,

  • I think it worked very well to have 2 people presenting and bouncing off one another - makes a very big difference and kept things interesting!
  • Some of the presenters were trying to do a 'Laurel and Hardy' approach, which personally I do not think came across well.

One of the requests was for

  • Better answers to questions on comparison features to opposition, it's a technical forum so I expect to hear technical answers not market positioning.

Now this seems a reasonable request until you consider that I have to know Office Communications Server, all of Windows Server (with an emphasis on Hyper-V and terminal Services) all of Vista, have a handle on deployment technologies, and at least some clue about the management technologies like Virtual Machine Manager. Someone lambasted Viral in Cardiff for not knowing about Backup Domain Controllers: Viral's not primarily an AD person and he joined Microsoft five years after BDCs were declared obsolete. So besides the breadth of technologies we have know history and futures (never forgetting to divide those into rumours, secrets, plans etc.) And then people expect us to have a good understanding of the offerings from companies with complimentary technologies, like Citrix and what the respondent calls the "opposition". Assuming we know all of that stuff we have about two minutes to answer any question and have to cover ground and pitch the response at the right level for the audience. If the question is "Can you give me a detailed summary of the High availability and resource distribution features in VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V and compare them" we're not going to do a great job. How well do you think Microsoft and VMware can describe each others products anyway.

That said we can say some things about Microsoft and VMware and the approaches of both when it comes to High availability.  And I'm going to deal with that in the next post.