Ken Arnold's Blog

Continuing to wait for Gosling...

I will never understand why marketing people haven't learned how to talk to geeks after the decades since computer conferences have been going on. Scripted pseudo-conversations, for example, really don't work -- they're just inane. The fact that they're pre-scripted makes them inane. There's just no way around it. It's not like the two Sun engineers showing off Rave were making this demo up.

Is a Web Service possibly available on the entire World Wide Web? Thanks for saying so, I wasn't sure! She wanted three components? Which ones? Wow, what a surprise! She would like to add a column to the database, can he do that? Why, yes he can! Would adding some buttons be good? Why yes, she thinks so!

We've all seen worse, by a long stretch.^[1] But it was bad enough to get me to fire up my laptop and kvetch about it (maybe to avoid actually watching).

Marketing folks, listen up: This Never Works.

At least it was punctuated by a live demo failure. That was real, and handled very well. And look how it brought the crowd back in, so listen up: Reality Works.

(If that was staged to pull folks in ... Nah, couldn't happen.)

Oh, and in case you were still counting: The number of people brought on the stage from smaller companies doing cool stuff? Still zero.

[1] The worst I ever saw was at a Usenix conference where some company was claiming to provide "The Marriage Between Unix and Foo". (I've mercifully forgotten what "Foo" actually was.) So they hired a couple of actors to dress up as bride and groom and hang around the booth for a few days of scheduled events like "The Cake", "The Champagne", and (get ready to cringe) "The Vows". I hung out in a booth across the aisle and watched, sort of like looking at a car accident. Attendees started to avoid the entire aisle of because it was so embarrassing, and the company's booth geeks were trying to make sure their badges were on backwards so they could possibly get another job again, hopefully before the end of the show.

I suppose, in some sense, the marketeers succeeded in burning the event into my brain. Frightening, now that I think of that.

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