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Friday, February 29, 2008
SourceGear at SD West next week
SD West is next week
and SourceGear has a whole bunch of stuff happening:
Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1
We like to use trade shows as a public debut of new
products. Last week we
shipped
"dot one" releases
of Vault and Fortress. SD West
will be our first opportunity to talk with customers in person about these new
versions.
Interactions like these are a big part of what makes a trade
show trip worthwhile for us. The business of software can be so impersonal.
Software flows out our T1 line. Money flows in. I love trade shows because
they're a place where customers are not just rows in a database. People stop
by and tell us they love our product. We thank them. People come and tell us
we disappointed them. We listen.
But mostly, people come and ask us what's new. We show
them. And their reactions are some of the best product feedback we get.
Fortress 1.1 and Vault 4.1 have some cool new stuff. Here's
a shot of the new "tag cloud" feature in Fortress:
Come see us in booth 308 next week and we'll show you.
T-Shirts and Comic Books
 Continuing our Evil Mastermind theme, we
have arranged to have a comic book placed in the conference bag for every
attendee.
We also have a new edition of the Evil Mastermind T-shirt.
We're bringing a thousand of them to give away in our booth.
Beat Jeremy at Guitar Hero
 The other tenants in our office building don't have any
idea what we do. They refer to SourceGear as "that company with a pool table
up on the top floor".
I wonder what those folks would have said about the company HORSE games we
used to have at our previous location. :-)
Anyway, I strongly believe that a little recreation is a
critical part of the culture of any good software company.
These days, the popular place to be at SourceGear is the room
with the video game consoles hooked up to the plasma TV. It turns out that our
development team lead is pretty darn good at Guitar Hero. In fact, he will be taking
on all challengers in our booth at SD West next week. We'll give a 5-user
Fortress license to anyone who can beat him.
Evil Mastermind guitar
 And if we're going to play Guitar Hero, why not have the
real thing as well? On the last day of the show we will have a prize drawing
for an Evil Mastermind electric guitar. It's a Schecter PT, and the customization
work was professionally done. I saw this instrument yesterday, and it looks
really sweet. For more details, see Paul
Roub's blog.
My panel session on Friday
 Friday morning at the conference I will be moderating a
panel discussion. It's in the Business
of Software track, and the topic is Private Company Exit Strategies.
The Jolt Awards
 We are honored that SourceGear DiffMerge has
been chosen as one of the Jolt Award finalists this year. We'll
be there at the announcement ceremony March 5th. The competition in
our category looks really tough, but somebody's gonna win, so we're hoping it's
us. :-)
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