Podcast: Gartner attendees contemplate outsourcing, desktop Linux, Web apps and more
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Ever since I started covering Gartner Symposium/ITxpo (years back), I've been going to the keynotes and the sessions, returning to the press room, and hammering out write-ups of what I heard. No doubt, I'll be doing that today if Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer drops any bombshells during his keynote "Mastermind" session. But this year, I've been changing my approach, siezing the opportunity to speak with attendees to hear about what's on their minds and checking in on attitudes regarding popular trends in information technology. In this five minute podast with five separate Gartner attendees (probably my most complicated audio editing job to date), I asked each the same seven questions:
- Budget: Up or down?
- Outsourcing: More or less?
- Scale up or scale out?
- Vista: Ho-hum or can't wait?
- Desktop Linux: Non-starter or contender?
- Web-based productivity (eg: Word processing, spreadsheets): Fiction or reality?
- What do you hope to accomplish while at the conference?
Of the first five questions, only one received the same answer from everybody. Can you guess which one? In fact, before listening to the podcast, see if you can guess what the split was for each question. It's only 5 minutes long so it goes very quickly.
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