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

Re:Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote

[Zorilla]

Damn GNU hippies! :-)

That's GNU/Hippies, GNU/dammit!

Live and Continuing Failure.

[twitter]

In my other life I do tech for a local community theatre group.

I do a free software demo once a month. I've had problems, but nothing like a BSoD. My machines, like all the other demos at CES, stay up even if pieces fail.

It sounds to me like the Microsofties did fine.

I'm not sure how you can say that. Gates was obviously pissed and did not play well with other's who tried to help him. It was a classic display of lack of cool. The aftermath is this pathetic spin piece that could be summarized in two sentences but was not. The guy is falling on his sword and trying to blame hardware for what was obviously buggy and graceless software. A poor performance followed by a lie, how sorry can you get?

Let me clearly distinguish the differences between your world and a technical demonstration.

People go to the theater to be entertained. You are supposed to suspend your disbelief. When some gadget does not work, people are entertained anyway. In fact, it can be more fun that way. No one reasonable feels cheated.

People go to a tech demo to see what you have. When what you have fails, you've seen all you need to know. You might feel cheated if you let someone blow smoke on you and you then go buy the buggy junk because you think it's not really broken. On the rare occasion something does not work at one of my demo's, I tell my audience right there and then. I don't try to hide the problems or blame shift or charge people money for something afterward.

The whole thing is just Microsoft. They made something so buggy they could not even demo it this time. They hyped it before hand and they will continue to hype it. The spin is best characterized by the phrase that was repeated in the article:

... the team pulled it out despite some obstacles ... how they kept things moving ...

I don't want to have that kind of problem with something I pay for that supposed to just work. Microsoft is supposed to make things easy, but they don't.