Waldo Smeets .com

Almost 5 months without blogging, I hope I did not let you down dear website and dear visitors. How comes?

Macromedia Netherlands is growing big time, and my job keeps changing bit by bit. Actually, my official title now is Technical Sales Manager and I’m more focussed on sales than I was a year ago. I’ve had the privilege to be able to mainly focus on Flex though, so there’s still a whole lot of ‘tech talk’ going on though :o)

This is just a writing to let you know how I’m doing and why I haven’t blogged for a while.

Early 2004 it was only 2 of us in the local office, now it’s 5. Then I travelled only Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Now I’ve added Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark to that region. We are actually in the process of hiring the 6th person to the group, more on that later.

Since my colleagues are top sales guys – read ‘non techie’ – I was supporting most of them to pitch the Macromedia Flash Platform to their accounts when needed. We’ve started some great Flex projects lately (we’ve got over 20 Flex customers right now) and I’ve worked with a lot of partners and customers since. I’ve talked a lot about the technology and platform during this period. But… this resulted in me ignoring my blog (and yes, I’ve still got to move to a faster hosting provider… it’s on the list).

In all honesty, I did not spend a lot of time doing real coding and experiments during the last 6 months. I’ve had the luck to start working with Flex a year before it hit the market, so I’ve been way ahead of the customers that I work with. I still feel like I am, but due to me not experimenting for 6 months I notice that some of them are catching up for sure. Actually, I am convinced that this is a good sign that the Flex market is growing up!

On the other hand, it’s my job to stay ahead of the customers. For that reason I am very happy that I am getting some extra help; the 6th person I talked about is going to be another Sales Engineer. Hopefully we can balance the load of work a little bit, so that I can also work on my hands-on experience again and once more blog about it.

Whilst the summer normally is a period of rest, this year it’s also a period of preparing myself for the next phase; we’ve got some great projects in the pipeline which need to be worked on, we plan to launch new products which I still have to learn more about, I’ll be speaking at MAX 2005, I’ll be attending lots of local events in September (IBC, FlashForward and several others), I’ll have to teach my new colleague how to sell Macromedia, I have to prepare for the Adobe times which are ahead and last but not least I hope to have some extra time to dive into the future of the Flash Platform (Mistral, Zorn)….

… it’ll probably be a while before I post on this blog again 😉

I hope you’ll all have a great summer. I look forward to meeting you again during one of the projects I’m involved in, or at one of my ‘public appearances’!