Microsoft's Technical Glitches at CES Explained

Thomas Hawk writes "Sean Alexander is one of the guys on the Media Center Team at Microsoft who was involved in the CES presentation with Bill Gates. Sean also runs a very interesting blog called Addicted to Digital Media. Gates and Microsoft have taken a lot of heat over the course of the last two days for the technical glitches in Microsoft's presentation at CES. Sean offers us the rare glimpse on why the glitches happened and what it's like to be backstage at the big Microsoft presentation at CES. Very good follow up on Sean's part." Update: 01/08 19:03 GMT by T : Hawk writes with a static link to Alexander's story.

Comments

Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote

[Anonymous Coward]

[Disclaimer: the following comments are my own based on my own perception of events. Provided as-is and confers no rights]
Wow, things have been so busy here at CES that I'm just getting around to blogging, starting with my promised behind the scenes of the Bill Gates CES 2005 Keynote. I've done a short version and a long version for those who have been emailing, asking me to follow up on my earlier post.

Summary
Wednesday night, Bill Gates hosted the 2005 CES Opening Keynote along with his surprise guest, Late Night's Conan O'Brien. Overall I think things went well, but as can happen with live events with so many variables, there were a couple of technical issues noted by sites like Engadget. The key thing for me that I could have done a better job on-stage pointing out is that despitea small glitch with a remotecontrol (IR) receiver, a single Media Center ran all theMedia Center demos andwe kept rolling despitethe hiccup. According to the postmortem, it appears a 2nd IR receiverrun over to Bill's seat failed, so the Media Center never got the signal. It could have been all the IR interference in the venue- cameras and plasma displays and lights, or the powered USB booster - a piece of equipment that gets a USB signal over a long-stretch. The production team also handled a small power outage exceptionally well in the minutes leading up which might have contributed. These things happen and the team pulled it out despite some obstacles out of their control.

Below is my account of what was happening back stage.

Rehearsals
Setup and runthroughs went great the day before and day of.We did about a half-dozen individual runthroughs and 3-4 end to end runthroughs. Everything was running great except for an intermittent Internet bandwidth issue. We replaced a router and that appeared to solve part of the problem but bandwidth continued to be intermittent as I noted in my previous entry.

15 Minutes Till Showtime: Makeup
Yes, we had to wear makeup. I sat in a chair next to Conan and we discussed our Irish roots and he was cracking jokes. The night before, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have dinner with Conan and a few folks from his Late Night team at Nobu in the Hard Rock Hotel. What a great guy, a great storyteller and super-funny. I can see why he's been announced as the next host of The Tonight Show when Jay steps down.

Showtime!
For the account below, here are my own thoughts and the timing is approximate thanks to Engadget :)

6:30pm - Everyone is charged up and ready to go. Gary Shapiro, President of the CEA (host of CES)is getting ready to go on-stage. But firsta little background - in order to drive the slides and overall production coordination, a sort of "Mission Control" is set up backstage to drive the technical systems - slides, prompters, timers etc. We're settling in for Conan's monologue when two electrical engineerswalk behind themain operations tables to check a piece of equipment. From my vantage point, one the UPSes (Uninterruptable Power Supplies) has been triggered and they're troubleshooting.

6:31pm - Everything is still running- troubleshootingis going onin the dark with flashlights, more engineers and members of the production crew are working methodically, as the UPS is running down, tracing connections, circuits. I'm standing clear w/ my team going over what I want to say. I find out later the presentation systems are all on the same UPS- slides moved to backup and systems are being powered down.

6:40pm - The UPS is going. The Xboxes for the Forza Racing game sneak preview demos (which we had back stage due to space restrictions on stage) lost power. It appears the main demo systems on-stage weren't affected except for Xbox from what I can tell. Their bringing their demosback up.

6:41pm - Keynote starts. We're looking good- the power circuit is back but the production team decidesto continue on backup PPT cuing systems as best I can tell. The show must go on. :)

Blooper Video

[antdude]

Click here to view a streaming video. It shows Conan O'Brien easing the tension with his classic humor as Bill Gates encountered problems with his remote control while demoing the Windows Media Center.

IIS - that explains it!

[Hamstij]

Wow - not even half a dozen posts and his website is already down.

But Netcraft (and "What's that site running?") goes a long way to explaining why!

blog.seanalexander.com Windows 2000

Re:Up and running Win XP 64 build 1289

[JustNiz]

Oh man what a troll. Do you even check your 'facts'?

1) There IS 64 bit Linux. (e.g. RedHat Enterprise 3 64 bit version)

2) The analog to a start menu was in the first Apple Mac GUIs, WAY before Windows.

3) Popup blockers have been around a LONG time in mozilla/firefox etc. IE has just finally got a very poor implementation of it.

4) 3 button mice were on many Unix Workstations as standard at least 15 years ago, At that time you couldn't even buy a 3 button windows mouse. Middle mouse button usage is stil far better integrated into the X window/Unix/Linux world than Windows.

Re:Same machine

[bigman2003]

Wow...you must be fun at parties.

The second poster was actually furthering the first posters joke.

First poster "ha ha...the webserver doesn't work either"

Second poster "he he...no, it's working...but the report only consists of the two words 'Service Unavailable', which sums up the problem"

So now I'm in the asshat category for trying to explain it...oh well.

Re:Never seen Steve Jobs in this situation

[kristofme]

Here is just one of many examples (from a while back).
Of course, keep in mind that he gives demos all the time, and more so than Gates, so it's bound to happen now and then..

Slides located "here"?

[ansak]

As in here.

fwiw: I got into the page after 15 tries, myself.

cheers...ank