Howard Street between 3rd and 4th Streets in front of Moscone Center has been closed to auto traffic this week for the annual Salesforce convention named Dreamforce.
Plenty of people have been bitching about the inconvenience and the resulting traffic snarls downtown, but I like it.
Hanging out in an outdoor/indoor space with interesting working people downtown with no cars, no bicycles, and nothing but pedestrians should be considered as a permanent feature.
There were free cornhole games on the synthetic lawn on Tuesday...
...and the opportunity to mingle with odd celebrities...
...and drink free beer in the early evening.
I made my way through the expo and never did quite figure out what Salesforce did (thank the technology gods for Wikipedia), other than the San Francisco based global conglomerate had something to do with cloud computing and was an offshoot of Oracle.
Another vague picture from the media was that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is sort of the socially conscious yin to the piratical, dark yang of Oracle's Larry Ellison as they both acquire one company after another in an attempt to build the future.
The design of the booths and the giveaway swag and the attempts to wow were very well done...
...and the atmosphere was a mixture of half Grand Bazaar and half Barnum & Bailey.
I like the free beer part.
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