Criticizing competitors
Josh Long: I'd say that's more a marketing function. All of us are given to being snarky, especially these days. It's so easy to be critical about competitors, or take pot shots, but if you do that, you're not the best advocate.
I'm not trying to diminish other techs: I'm only trying to let things I care about sell themselves. There's a difference between force-feeding somebody conclusions versus giving them the facts that they can use to, hopefully, arrive at conclusions. I sometimes poke fun at a tech, but I then proceed to use that exact tech on stage. So, I'm poking fun at myself, ultimately.
You can point people in a certain direction, but I know what it's like to have gone to a talk and felt like I just had the wool pulled over my eyes. I feel that way with slideware talks. You walk out at the finish line at the same place, but you don't quite know how you got there, so you feel like something was missing...