I walked the floor for around 3+ hours today and will probably go back tomorrow for a little while (I'm a glutton for punishment)...comments: 1) At least 70% focused on hardware, when I first started attending this WAS a software show 2) At least 30% of the smaller (both SW / HW) vendors at last year's show didn't "show" up this year -- and the replacement newbie's are probably one-timers at their first show 3) Companies that had had full booths in the past seem to have down-sized to "partner stations" at the HP, IBM, Dell, Novell (Suse Linux), etc. pavilions 4)Only 1 pure-play security vendor, the Romanian company BitDefender -- last year there were at least 5 5) NO!!! MS booth / pavilion as there was last year 6) It was sort of interesting, actually, to note who was not there in full-booth (or in some cases even at "partner stations"): Sun (Schwartz gave the keynote 3 years ago and Sun has been a presence for quite a while), Sybase, Engenera (high-performance blade arrays), and most surprisingly RedHat (sort of got the feeling from the RH guy in the Dell pavilion [the only RH presence I found] that since they own such a large market share they can be arrogant and not publicly interact with their customers) 7) There were pennants up on the dates for next year's show but from what I heard about the Spring Boston show and observed today this franchise may not make it that far.....