I’m an early adopter.  Tell me there’s some new hotness out there on the web, and I’m there to check it out.  I might or might not continue to use it, but I’ve always checked it out.  One of my favorite things about working in high tech is that I get to be an uber-early adopter.  I get access to projects that we’re working on before they’re in beta, so I get to play around with them and hopefully offer ideas for improvement (or at least find some bugs so that they get fixed before they’re out in the real world).

VMware has been great about feeding this addiction to early adoption.  We’ve acquired some great companies lately, and they’re ones with products that I’ve been really excited to start using.  Earlier this year, we acquired SlideRocket.  Switching away from PowerPoint is hard, especially given how long I spent as a member of that team.  But my strong desire to use VMware’s products as much as possible means that I took the plunge.

Switching to SlideRocket has been surprisingly easy.  My deep knowledge of PowerPoint hasn’t hindered me from picking up how to best use SlideRocket quickly.  I also like that it makes including web-based content easy.  Want a YouTube video? Done.  Want a live Twitter feed?  You got it.  It’s not magic, but it’s so slick that I don’t care.

So far, my favorite thing about SlideRocket is the ease of sharing my presentations.  I create a lot of presentations.  In my PowerPoint days, sharing a presentation meant that I was emailing it as an attachment, or perhaps storing it on my wiki.  This, of course, resulted in exceeding my mail quota with all of these attachments.  With SlideRocket, I share a link and a password to access the presentation.  My mailbox quota appreciates it.