While Microsoft held its SharePoint 2008 Conference in Seattle last week, AIIM, which now calls itself the ECM Association, held its in Boston. Coincidence? I think so. But it left some wondering.

Where would you rather have been? Listening to Bill Gates, whom some apparently view as a rock star, or David Pogue, the personal technology columnist for the New York Times AND Matthew Glotzbach, Google's Director of Product Management?

Since I already posted about the SharePoint Conference 2008, here are some highlights from the speakers at AIIM. (More to come.)

Pogue told the attendees (crowd would be an overstatement- AIIM had a great program, why didn't , more people go?) that there should be a simplicity of design in computer software and hardware . Why? Because it's more efficient.  Besides, people want technology to make their lives simpler, not more complex. I agree. Most end-users don't want to think about the genius of the developer or architect who built their applications ; they're not all that interested in the PM; they just want to do their jobs and leave the office.

Are you any different? Do you think about the farmer who grew the grain for your bread when you eat a sandwich? How about the baker that baked it, or the truck that drove it to your store? You just want to eat, right? The same is true of your user.

Pogue also said, and I quote this from AIIM President, John Mancini's interview with Pogue:

"Badly, overly designed software and hardware makes you feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and inferior. (Those are misplaced emotions; it's the designers who should feel like failures, not the customer.) That's not the way to endear yourself to your customers, not the way to inspire repeat purchases, and not the way to trigger good word-of-mouth."

Need a technologically-oriented example? Think about your iPod, Microsoft Office software, your printer. Easy to use, right? How about the technology you create, is the learning curve shallow enough?

After Pogue, Glotzbach, according to a report by Industry Guy Creese, did a Show 'N Tell on Google Apps. If you don't want to click over, here's what he wrote:

Matt's presentation, delivered under the guise of talking about "The Power of Simplicity," was actually a 30-minute ad for Google: "Let me show you e-mail in Google Apps.... This is an example of Google Spreadsheets.... Here's what Google Sites looks like...." Enough said.

It was also reported that Glotzbach bragged that because the documents he was editing resided in "the cloud",  they would survive a hard-drive crash. And while that may have been true in his case (he apparently had an ethernet connection), members of the audience were unable to connect wirelessly, so their cloud-dwelling documents would have been inaccessible.