Chance meetings at 37,000 feet

I spend quite some time traveling to my company's offices, to conferences and to customer sites.  This means that I find myself sitting next to an amazing collection of people over the course of a year.  Sometimes, these people clearly want to be left alone to work or to read a book or a magazine. Other times, they're interested in talking to pass the time away.

While I'd love to get out my laptop and write, analyze data or write a document or presentation, I don't feel comfortable doing that in my usual coach-class seat.  I fear that the person sitting in front of me will recline their seat back and crunch my screen.  So, the laptop stays in my briefcase. As an aside, I'd love to see a Mac netbook that would allow me to deal with this issue.

I just returned from New York and found myself seated next to the CMO of a health care company. After we introduced ourselves to one another, I found myself peppered with questions about cloud computing, virtualization technology.

Although certainly not a statistically significant sample, this one conversation highlighted to me that these two topics have gotten through to business executives.  They've heard of them, but often don't really understand them or how they could be applied to help their organization do better, do it more efficiently or do more of it for the same money.

It is clear to me that the industry needs to do a better job of explaining these topics.