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French developers walk out of MS presentation :-)
>From a reader note on www.macosrumors.com:
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A reader forwarded this tale of a recent Microsoft presentation at a French
developer's conference, and its hilarious results:
I was at the Microsoft developer conference in Paris. The attendance at the
beginning was a solid 1200 developer, at the end a mere 50! here is what
happened;
During the 4 hours show they spent 2 hours presenting IE4.0 and after the
break started with "A word on Java".
First the French director of marketing asked "how many of you have used
java" and about 75% of the room raised their hands he then asked "and of
those, how many do have something out in production" a mere 30% raised their
hands (wich i though was good enough!) and then proceeded to bash java for
all its weaknesses. For his grand finale he talked about Mocha and Wingdis
saying that this is what happened with the byte-code, that anybody could
decompile and read those precious lines you had sweated so much to code, bla
bla bla.... and showed on a wide screen the decompiled code.
You would not believe it but the crowd started booing and hissing, granted
that it wasn't a smart thing to do, and then silence again even on a
bewildered stage, until somebody yelled "GO JAVA!" (which in French sounds
like: "Allez Java!") and the whole room started cheering and applauding...
the guys on stage physically stepped back and were obviously stunned that it
would backfire like that.
It was beautiful.
And then the people started leaving the room, at first one by one and then
massively over the course of an hour. The guy on stage could not believe his
eyes and the poor devil couldn't find his words, he was actually pathetic
when he squirmished a "I have to finish this..." as people were leaving
right under his nose.
The funniest part was the end. After 1 more hour of a bleeding Microsoft
audience, and of people randomly applauding and yelling "Java!", and a
presentation they had to stop short due to the speaker weak state, marketing
had prepared a game where they would give gifts to people randomly chosen...
of course it wasn't until the 7th name or so that the guy was actually still
present in the room and it was a guy from Oracle. No comment. With merely 50
people left in the room, the very brief Question and Answer session started
and guess what?
They had 4 questions on portability ;-)
Like i said ... it was beautiful!
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--
Eric Bennett ( [email protected] ; http://www.pobox.com/~ericb )
Viewers/Converters for common internet file formats at
http://www.pobox.com/~ericb/xplat/xplat.html
In the office market, once you get into Microsoft Office, it's a Roach
Motel. Someone else controls the file formats in such a way that it's very
hard to get out. In the media space, MPEG, AC3 Dolby, FireWire, all these
are external formats, not controlled by any of the players. We have more
room, because no one is playing games with the formats. - Jean Louis
Gassee, CEO, Be Inc.
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