--On Friday, March 16, 2012 17:49 -0800 Melinda Shore
<melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> No harm in looking at it, though. Questions about what it
> would
> offer that participants would find useful (other than beer).
Not to pick on Melinda (her note was just handy), but I want to
push back a bit on the "no harm in trying this" hypothesis
("looking" is another issue).
Many participants in the IETF, including people from exactly the
vendors one might expect to be looking for booths (or whatever),
have been complaining in recent years about pressure on travel
budgets, especially for multiple attendees from their
organizations. So suppose vendor X is now sending 10 people to
the IETF (and used to send 15 or 20). Suppose we offer them a
show floor or equivalent and they decide they need to send five
market or sales folk to staff it. There are certainly companies
whose travel budgets for engineering staff are completely
separate from those for sales and marketing, but my experience
and some studies I've seen in recent years suggest not a huge
number of them.
Especially for the others, do we really believe that starting
with 10 engineering attendees and deciding that one needs five
marketing/sales people present is going to produce 15 people
traveling total? I'd say "maybe" if the sales/marketing people
could be pulled out of an office that was local to the IETF
venue but "almost certainly not" if people had to be put on
airplanes and put up in hotels. For the latter situation, maybe
one would get lucky and end up with a dozen people (i.e., a
reduction in engineering attendance at the IETF of only three).
Less lucky and the "10 people" remains constant and IETF
participant attendance goes down by half.
Note too that, if the company sends only five technical people
and concludes that it doesn't suffer harm from that small a
number, the odds of getting back up to 10 if the experiment is
terminated and those five sales/market types disappear is just
about zero, at least until the economy improves considerable.
Scale and juggle the figures as you like, this is not a
zero-risk experiment.
john