The Tech Zone Vs. Microsoft

The Conference started on Friday Sept 15th. There would be an evening reception on Thursday the 14th. My plane landed at SeaTac airport at 4:50PM on Thursday afternoon. I was told there would be a driver waiting for me to take me to my hotel. I just needed to find the baggage area. Sure enough, there was a guy in a suit with the name "J Chow" written on it at the baggage area.  When we got to the hotel, the driver gave me an invoice to sign. The bill would be sent to Microsoft since they were paying my expenses. I noted that the limo ride cost $45 and the tip was left blank for me to fill out. So, I just entered $45, signed it and handed back to my wide eye driver. I must say he was one happy driver. 

I still had an hour before the evening reception so I headed for the bar downstairs. I met a Venture Capitalist from New York who was there for an InfoSpace financial analyst meeting which was also being held at the same hotel. Since I had time to kill I decided to crash the InfoSpace get together and came away with two golf shirts and a really nice InfoSpace gym bag. Also my new Venture Capitalist friend gave me some really cool stock tips. So if you see me on the next billionaire list, you know why :).

At 6:30PM, I joined 34 other people at the Microsoft reception. I was given a nice Pocket PC sweat suit (which someone stole) and got to meet Beth Goza and Dereck Brown, our hosts for the conference. Nearly all the 34 attendees were from Palm sites or leaders of Palm users groups. The only general hardware review sites invited were myself and Geek.com, who runs PDA Greek. One attendee noted how ironic it was that it took Microsoft to bring together the most powerful group of Palm people in the world.  

Feeding the lambs before the slaughter

Friday morning started with breakfast at Microsoft. We were all loaded onto a big Grey Hound like a pack of lemmings and shuttled to the MS campus. For those who has never been to Microsoft before, let me tell you it's very big and kinda intimidating, which I'm sure is the effect Microsoft is going for. 

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