IOUW vs Oracle... vs ???

Michael --

I'm with Tony on this one. The whole thing comes down to this: the resources of most of your potential attendees are not infinite. I would figure that most of the potential attendees are constrained by some combination of three factors: physical dollars; number of seminars allowable per year; or, number of days allowable out of the office.

You can say it any way you choose; but to me, the long and the short of it is that there are now two conferences vying for the same attendees that one conference was vying for in 1995. It is my bet that you will both have a lower turnout separately than you would have if the conferences were conjoined, and that there will be a certain percentage of your market that will attend neither saying, "A Pox On Both Their Houses".

Now, we're down to brass tacks. You will certainly lose something; as will Oracle; as will we. The question comes in, "What is gained to offset these losses?". When questions are posed like that, I *personally* look for a marketing angle. And I can see two, which aren't terribly flattering. One says, "we'll take the nerds and separate them from the new customers so that we can say what we want to our new customers without having to worry about some technophile gainsaying us." The other is "these geeks just aren't interested in the new technology that Oracle has in store, they'd rather submerge themselves in the intracacies of the current technology." If some marketing geek is saying that, I'd analyze it fairly carefully, if I were you... which I'm not.

Now that I've given my analysis of the situation, I'd really love to hear the rationale that led up to the situation... but, that's me...

Hope you're having a great day!!
 Bambi. Received on Thu Jan 25 1996 - 14:52:15 CST