Why not take VMworld 2010 out of the US altogether?  There has to be some place in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver that can hold a convernece of this size.

I will never attend another one. My first was my last. I found muffins in a class on my first day which was a good thing since they ran out of lunches that day. I was going to go to a lab on the second day and the folks working the coffee wouldn't let me have any because they said no one could have coffee until 9:15. I was in there at 9:10. I wanted to go get in line. No breakfast this day. Found only coffee the third day nor snacks. Ran out of beer everynight seems like. An who was the idiot that wanted to put ping-pong tables outside in the windy city. This whole event was terrible.

Hey, it added some excitment to the week!    I saw a guy get tackled by the police on the street for inappropriately grabbing a lady (neither associated with the event).  I took the BART from the airport and I got to see the part of San Francisco you never see on TV.  I definitely wasn't going to take the BART for my late night trip back to the airport.

I was honestly surprised.  I know every big city has its problem areas but three of the four nights I was out I saw police making arrests within a block of the event.   I've never encountered that during multiple trips to Vegas.

Matt,

Where are you located?  I could understand your fear of walking out at night if you were from podunk, Iowa.  If you thought SF was bad, don't ever go to Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, Columbus, Pittusburgh, Detroit, Indy, etc.

We walked outside between the hours of 12am and 5am multiple times throughout the week and no only was I surprised at how clean the streets were, but the homeless were sleeping (hidden from plain view) and there were no thugs.  I felt completely safe walking the streets.

Last time VMworld was at Moscone I thought it was a bad venue, and nothing this year changed my thoughts on that.  Whomever stated there wasn't enough food or beer for the party must have been standing outside at  Yerba Buena.  Inside where the real party was at, I waited in line for 30 seconds tops to get a beer and had maybe 2 people lined up at the food in front of me before I picked up my fork and napkin.

The party, I thought, was good.  Foreigner was amazing.  Much better than the claustrophobic fest held on T.I. the last time.

Food for lunches was mediocre at best.  Snacks between sessions was non-existant.  Keynotes left much to be disired.

I'm pleased to see it is in SF!!  i would not be able to go if it was in Vegas.  Furthermore, i much prefer to spend a couple extra days in SF as compared to Vegas anyway.  

The food wasn't so great this year, but I belive that a 3rd party vendor (HP, Dell, Whatever) did not sponsor it. usually that's what happens.    VMware should have just told us to expect box lunch type offerings and for those of us who prefer something else,  we could have planned accordingly.     VMware:  Expectation is the name of the game for customer satisfaction.

As for the sales pitches, certainly there were some.  I didn't go to those.   Feel free to walk out if it's a sales pitch and go to another session.  Many of the sessions have space for you even if you did not sign up.

How can you say the quality of the show is better than in Boston or NY when it has never been there?  Microsoft has held very successful Tech-Ed's in Boston with a lot more people.  And everything fits in a single building.  EMC has had EMC world there too.

And wait ...... the quality of attendees is higher in SF?  What does that even mean?