Dreamforce: way, way more than a user conference

Five years ago, I called Dreamforce a “rainbow coalition” given the wide range of musicians, politicians, and guest executives you could see on the stage and often run into the luminaries on the floor.

If that was diverse, you should see this year’s keynote slate – sports luminaries, political activists, philanthropists, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, astronauts, life coaches and so many more add to the diversity. The pic below has a tiny (and I mean tiny) portion of those presenting.

Dreamforce now rivals the Paris Air Show, CES in Las Vegas, CeBIT in Hanover in crowd size, miles you walk, parties you can attend, press releases you can read and mega deals you can witness.

To Salesforce’s credit it also highlights a contemporary technology meme – this year it will be Artificial Intelligence, last year in was the Internet of Things.

The one negative – if I were a user looking for product guidance, release road maps, implementation tips  – that’s a lot of noise to cut through.

Hold on, silly me, why am I calling it a user conference?