Re: COMMON Update... - the Porsche give-away? -- MIDRANGE-L

Ron,

You are one attendee. Regardless of how you scheduled your time, you do nothave to feel guilty for attending the scam event - and it seems you have awell thought out approach to the entire conference.

However, I do not expect that you speak for the majority. When there was adecision to be made between the conference educational events and a $90,000Porsche, the people I spoke to decided on the raffle. There were so manypeople who told me they would have been at the COMMON sessions if it was notfor the raffle. I even spoke to many people who finally made it intoCUDS/Domino and they told me the alcohol was a large draw over theconference educational events. Ok, so some of them were very tipsy and I didsay "nyeh nyeh you got scammed".

I expect that if the scam was not held, the number of attendees at the PDnight would have been substantially higher. If you looked closely, thesefour sessions were meant to be more of a break and a balance against thepure technical content of the conference, so maybe we would have even hadyou there.

I do agree with your ideas on how to approach Quadrant. And I would addthis. When you call Quadrant, call your favorite COMMON board member and letthem know how you feel.


Trevor

----- Original Message -----From: <Ron-Zimmerman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 7:54 PM
Subject: Re: COMMON Update... - the Porsche give-away?

I've been thinking about this for several hours since first reading it.
I'm personally offended by the implication that the attendees are to blame
in any way for this.  I know in my own case, when I had looked at the
sessions for the week I had made the decision early on that none of the
four educational sessions that evening were of interest to me.  I was
interested in and did attend Al's BOF on the new time functions of the
operating system.  I made those decisions before ever knowing anything
about what Quadrant had planed

I did go to the Quadrant event because their software may be of interest
to us and I wanted to hear about the announcement that was supposedly the
real reason for this party.  (Sure it would have been nice to win the
Porsche, but I had no illusions of really winning it - besides, I couldn't
afford it on my salary anyway.)

When you want to blame the attendees, remember that the whole week is a
series of decisions about which sessions to attend.  We are constantly
making choices as to whose session to attend, or sometimes even choosing
to not attend any session at all during a particular time slot to give
yourself a chance to rest a little bit.

I certainly agree that Quadrant was way, way off base on this one and I
hope the BOD takes action to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.
I hope they also have some serious talks with the folks from Quadrant to
make sure there is an understanding of how badly this has damaged their
relationship with COMMON and it's members.

I would also call on all Quadrant customers and potential customers that
were there to be sure and tell their Quadrant contact what they thought of
the whole thing.  I know in my case, I will be telling them that they are
going to have to do an even better job of selling me after this and they
are going to have to rebuild their reputation with me before I will be
ready to do business them.

Thank you,
Ronald L. Zimmerman
I.T. Applications Manager
Swiss Valley Farms, Co.      http://www.swissvalley.com
"The Good for You Company"
Email: Ron-Zimmerman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx