Voicecon SF 08

Just back from Voicecon in San Francisco. The weather was incredible, hard to stay inside for sessions. But good stuff. Mostly, food for thought more than direct information. The biggest deal for me was "generations", and this whole idea of the new workforce and what they expect in the workplace.

I'm old, over the hill, but I hope I still have a toe dipped in the new telecom culture pool. No problem with a monochrome display on my Avaya 96xx set, I hate Bluetooth dongles hanging off my ear (and the erie look of others who wear them), and 100 Meg Ethernet more than handles my data transmission needs.

But Alan Sulkin (another old telecom fart, with an AOL email account of all things!), provided the head's up, the shift in thinking... color, GigE, and Bluetooth, and of course, social networking. The new workforce won't even think of working for a company that doesn't provide these technologies. They may be techno jaded, but they are also way ahead of we traditional workers.

This generational transition was reinforced by a walk through SOMA on Thursday afternoon to meet the son of an old friend for lunch. He works for a 2.0 company, and the whole south of Market area of SF is populated by young workers attached to Facebook, Linked In, and other 2.0 companies. Amazing to wander amongst them, and try to accept the fact I'm soon out to pasture as they take over.

There was a morning session, with reps from the big companies, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. All in suits or nice slacks/sport shirts. Then there was the pres of Digium, in a hoody and t-shirt. Held his own in the session. I then had a vision of all the "suits" headed north into the financial district to beat each other up to land a large corporate account. But Mark of Digium was probably headed south to the 2.0 companies, and cleaning up providing their communications needs. Open source, cheap, extensible, write your own features... the new telecom.