Doug Mecham on Interex
ComputerWorld interviewed Doug Mecham, founder of Interex (now retired). He has this to say:
User groups are not as relevant today as they were before. The technology has polished off and leveled off. It's good enough so that you no longer have to dig deep into the software and a lot of the technical things that we dealt with in the early days. However, on the application side, I think they are very relevant, because you are looking for different solutions to different processing problems, different methods of processing. From that standpoint, they are of great value....
We were independent yet we were very close to HP, from top to bottom. I remember meeting with David Packard personally, a one-to-one for a half hour. He thoroughly supported the user group. I think he recognized the value of users working in close collaboration with the vendor. We were unique and certainly, in my view, second to none in being a [group] that didn't beat the vendor up. We worked in collaboration with them....
If the vendors are drivers, you're going to see one kind of conference. If the users are drivers, I think you're going to see another kind of profile of the conference.
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