"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them or glorify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things."
The text above wasn't quite written by me, it shipped with my new Mac, if you have one, open finder and take a closer look at TextEdit's icon.
Although the thought above wasn't written by me, it reflects exactly how I feel today.
An experiment, that is sure enough in its infancy. Although for years censorship surrounded the hallways of Citrix now we have a direct channel to allow our customers, partners, employees and most passionate geeks to speak up - speak whatever they want good or bad.
The ability of criticize or praise is within everyone's heart, however those speak their minds open the path for those who listen, and smart ones take advantage to improve when the road of improvement is presented.
I could make my above statement easier if removed the metaphors and simply say. We are open to hear from everyone our greatness and weakness - now more than ever we are open to act upon it and make the wrong, right.
Thanks for all those who helped us put together Geek Speak, for helping make it a naked conversation with our most important audience.
We will shape Geek Speak based on things we've learned, expect to see us rattling the cages in Vegas next year.
Another learning curve for both our team and Citrix, over 17,000 views in 3 days, 190 updates on our twitter feed, tons of live shots on Qik, over 70 veedios.
More than numbers Underground was a concept, the concept of change - no agendas, no holds bar format. Go out there be yourself show people what you see, give you very own view of the conference, while helping those outside to share the same experience.
We put together this little site together in two days, next time we will spend more cycles creating a more unique experience, more information, better formatting, more contributors and heck of a lot more fun!
If there's anything I highly regret is not being able to cover breakout sessions and keynotes, but since this Synergy is behind us, I won't spend my time in sorrow, instead I will make sure we focus and deliver what our visitors have asked us.
I can't thank everyone enough for putting their time and effort on pulling off Geek Speak and Underground. If you want to know the ones I'm actually speaking of, here they are: Adam Marano, Barry Flanagan, Chris Fleck, Vishal Ganeriwala, Sunil Kumar, John Fanelli, James Rabey, Myself and Rich Crusco.
Learned from our audience: Less PPTs showing how our products work and more Demos of them in action during Breakout sessions, Let's always give out our do's and don'ts when it comes down to showing the capabilities of our products.
This was an event like no one I've been before, it started a revolution and will continue to do so during our next years to come.
See you all in Vegas.
Cheers,
Gus Pinto
