<<The scent of DSL hung in the air>>
Hi Pat
I won't be attending the Amati presentation today and it doesn't look like MSNBC is recording it either, although Tellabs is being taped. Came across the following summary with some funny failures. Cheers.
A week in Las Vegas
By Todd Wallack
Network World, 5/12/97
Las Vegas - It's that time of year again.
Vint Cerf danced the Macarena. Gaggles of vendors gabbed about Gigabit Ethernet. And the scent of DSL hung in the air.
About 55,000 attendees, 700 reporters and 650 vendors converged on the Las Vegas convention center? last week for the latest edition of NetwWorld+ Interop 97, the king of networking conferences. Most spend the week talking about upgrading their networks to finally meet end users' expectations and end the World-Wide Wait.
''Everyone's talking about faster performance,'' said Jason Dessel, a network analyst with Universal Studios.
If only everyone agreed on the answers. With so many companies pitching so many products, some vendors went to extremes to grab attention.
Northern Telecom, Inc. planted a couple of Indy 500 race cars in its booth. Novell, Inc. had a bright red Humvee parked outside. Mylex Corp.'s new Network Power & Light division offered reporters helicotper rides over the Hoover Dam. Food, buttons and other freebies were everywhere.
But some took a low-key approach. ''We're actually having an air-conditioned meeting room,'' one vendor boasted.
The pitch might have worked better on Monday, when exhibitors first set up the booths in 93-degree heat. Because boxes were still being trucked into the convention hall, organizers could n'ot close the doors and crank up the air- conditioning.
Marketers sweltered, and technicians even had to shut down the Interop network after boxes started to fail.
Interop also featured a full lineup of big- name speakers. Marimba CEO Kim Polese, for instance, blasted Pointcast, Inc. and other push vendors for a host of sins she labeled ''bad push.'' Specifically, she said, they often hog bandwidth and disk space, make it hard to de-install their programs, give viruses easy access to networks and waste users' time.
Bay Networks, Inc. CEO David House raised eyebrows when he suggested Bay could become the Compaq Computer Corp. of the networking industry. House, reminding the audience that he really is not from the networking industry, said he thought networking was becoming ''PC-ified.''
Like IBM, which stumbled trying to develop its own PC operating system in the late 80s, House said he thought 3Com Corp. and Cisco Systems, Inc. were erring by developing proprietary networking hardware. Like Compaq did in the PC industry, House thought Bay could maneuver to become the industry leader by improving existing standards.
But the pitch might have fallen short. The next day, USA Today said Bay was so troubled that it is second only to Apple Computer, Inc. Indeed, even House's demo went haywire.
First, he accidentally clicked on a golf game. Then, he could n'ot find CU-See-Me on his menu list - someone in the audience had to point it out to him - and, even then, he got an error message. Finally, he tried to surf the Web, only to find his computer frozen. ''Well, you've all been out on the Web, right?'' he said.
Everyone seemed to make references to the speed of change. House said ''we now operate in dog years,'' where six weeks is the equivalent of a year. Polese mapped out the history of the Earth to demonstrate how many major events have occurred in the last few fractions.
Overall, vendors were pushing bigger pipes, better routers or switches and other products to upgrade the infrastructure.
Yet a few lonely voices were talking about ''quality of service.'' Nortel Chief Operating Officer John Roth said carriers can' not possibly keep up with the 100% growth rates in data traffic - so they need to start giving priority to the most critical packets.
Other vendors tried to play it hip. Novell's ''Rock the Net'' slogan was so common that someone asked CEO Eric Schmidt if he loves MTV. (Schmidt sidestepped the question.) Meanwhile, Shiva Corp. had three Generation Xers beating aluminum garbage cans under the billboard ''Rock Your World.''
There were other weird moments in the show: merchants selling denim ''Born to network'' shirts and Interop network managers hanging the Pink Panther from the rafters as a mascot. But perhaps the strangest moment was when the Father of the Internet started doing the Macarena.
Vint Cerf was on the keynote stage, chatting with Interop founder Dan Lynch, when a shrill alarm went off. ''The alarm is being investigated,'' a tape-recorded voice sounded.
The sound continued to blare through the convention hall intermittently for the next 20 minutes, until the disembodied voice said: ''There is no emergency...Resume your normal activities.'' At least twice.
But in the meantime, Cerf was killing time. He cracked jokes. He swayed to the alarm.
''Do you tango?'' he asked.
''There's not enough beat to dance,'' Lynch replied.
But it did not stop Cerf, even in his trademark three-piece suit. A few minutes later he jumped up, did a little jig and then the opening moves of the Macarena. |
