When I was getting my career going in Denver, Microsoft used to host lunch sessions every few weeks in their office. There were some Microsoft employees presenting and some community members. I learned a lot from both groups. At local user groups, more often than not, a community speaker was present, but there were plenty of people that worked for different vendor companies that delivered talks. I saw many of these people are knowledgeable in their area, and they taught me things I used in my job.

At some point, it started to seem that presenters that worked for companies weren't experts, and maybe more importantly, they weren't worth listening to because they were "selling something." In fact, a large community conference, and some small ones, banned "vendor" talks and the use of tools in presentations. Sometimes even free ones, if someone was promoting the software as the focus in their talk.

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