In the past three years I have attended over a hundred conferences including three Interips, two in Las Vegas and the first New York show. No one did more to help Interop succeed in it's first New York show then I did, Interop is coming to Town, Interop New York, I also make announcements in my SQL, SharePoint and Enterprise Windows user groups.
This year everything changed, CMP Media acquired Media Live and moved the show to September rather then December, which was a good time becaues of Christmas shopping. Then CMP Media began producing cheesey plastic blogs of their own without any readers. We're blogging - LOL. What if they gave a conference and nobody came?
Less then half of the vendors who were in Las Vegas in May bothered to show up and very few people travled to New York to attend Interop. I only bumped into two people I knew and we have a huge Tech community in New York.
You could have rolled a bolling ball down the isles of the Exhibition Hall and not touched a soul.
Just for a laugh have a look at their webcams, lots of servers and chars, but no people!
I spoke to Ben Stricker the Interop PR guy a month ago, but he didn't want my help, turns out he had cheesey plastic blogs and PodTech ready to do puff pieces for him.