Over the past two days, the MacTech Boot Camp in Seattle has brought together a robust audience of Apple aficionados. So intrigued was I that I attended part of both days. The first day (Tuesday) focused on an Office for Mac accreditation. Yesterday was the full-on robust workshop featuring a variety of Macintosh-centric topics including mobility, storage and Office as seen here: http://www.mactech.com/bootcamp/sessions.
Overall the attendees seemed extremely satisfied with the content and the conference. You can learn more about future venues and dates of this show here: http://www.mactech.com/events/locations
My keen interest in observing the boot camp was to detect if the convergence between the Mac and PC/Windows/Microsoft/Evil Empire communities are growing or declining. On the surface, I’d say the two communities are closer than ever. SMB environments are well known for having to support, but “camps” and several people I spoke with at lunch do exactly that. One sponsor, Parallels, underscores the convergence of the two sides working together with its ability to virtualize a Windows session on a Macintosh.
But let me take it one step further. Parallels is a good example. It has a Macintosh-centric division that sponsored the MacTech II workshop yesterday. It also has a cloud platform division that competes with Citrix in the race to create a community of cloud distributors and service brokers. It’s a world, quite frankly, I know well. In both my lunch conversations and in talking with the Parallels rep, it became apparent that the Mac “heads” are not as keen on the cloud CSP world of virtualization and the like (and the PC Windows “heads” are). In that since, there are still two distinct communities. My hope and desire is that more of the MacTech attendees would be open and receptive to a conversation about cloud services, virtualization and even virtual desktops. But, alas, such is not the case.
So I’ll leave my rambling there. It was a great day, great lunch, and I’m truly excited by the convergence possibilities between our two communities. But my expectations are also managed.
