Kemble, redherring.com
Can't this critic do better? I think this article is boring and Michael's agenda much more interesting! This article is old, from February 18, but I just read it last night and have not seen it posted on this thread. It does add humor!
RE: "Big weekend for The Matter Family." Congratulations! You have quite a legacy in the Matter family! :)Leigh
Big Fish: Michael Dell's sleepy keynote
By Paul Kapustka
Redherring.com, February 18, 2000
Michael Dell, I feel your pain.
I know what it's like to oversleep, especially on the morning of an important meeting. I know what it's like to rush around, looking for something to wear, struggling to get organized and get to where I'm supposed to be, beating back the hassles of traffic and parking. In fact, that pretty much describes my morning this past Tuesday, when I somehow finally managed to drive up to San Francisco to hear you speak.
Which was a lot easier than Mr. Dell's end of the deal.
Lucky for me, my job didn't involve TV cameras showing my face up-close and personal on stadium-size screens, to a theater packed with people. Mr. Dell, however, wasn't able to slink around in the back of the auditorium like I did. Instead, at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, he was on stage, under the bright lights, delivering the opening keynote at the Windows 2000 Conference and Expo.
Looking like he'd just rolled out of bed.
WAKE-UP CALL
It happens to all of us. You have an important meeting, one you can't miss, and things start going haywire. The suit you wanted to wear is at the cleaners, along with your good sweater. What the heck, you figure you can sluff your way through by covering up that wrinkled shirt with a sportcoat that really doesn't match your pants. Tie? Can't find one. Oh well. Splash some water on the face. Ahem. First slide, please.
How did Mr. Dell's speech go? It was boring. It was predictable. It praised Windows and denigrated Unix. It was widely quoted by many electronic and print media outlets. It offered little pizzazz and no savvy business-leader insights, but it didn't cause Dell (Nasdaq: DELL)'s stock to drop either. Of course, the theater was nice and dark, the seats comfy, the ventilation more than adequate. As far as keynotes go, it was a good place to take a nap.
Did I say nap? I'm awake! I even have some notes to prove it. "Downtime is not allowed," Mr. Dell said from the stage. Was he talking about Internet commerce, or reminding me that it was my own fault for not grabbing a cup of coffee? Either way, it worked.
A MEETING TOO FAR
Mr. Dell, perhaps, can be excused for not having his "A" game in place for the Win 2000 crowd. After all, he's been on the go recently, jetting off to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he hobnobbed with the rich, the famous, the powers that be. He's also been under fire from Wall Street for his company's recent lackluster quarter. With all those important meetings, maybe he just didn't have any pressed shirts or clean ties left in his travel bag.
Not like Mr. Dell's open-collar appearance mattered to Tuesday's crowd, a fashion-challenged throng of developers and geeks almost uniformly dressed in khakis and logo-wear shirts from their company or computer vendor of choice. During Mr. Dell's speech, they were apparently more interested in the contents of their canvas gimme bags anyway, looking to see if there were any free Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows 2000 CDs included.
The attendees, of course, might have been there to hear Mr. Dell tell them that "the Internet economy, depending on how you define it, is doubling every year." They nodded along as he said, "IT infrastructure is quickly becoming Internet infrastructure." Their ears perked up a little bit when Mr. Dell talked about accessing the Internet via a wireless CDPD (cellular digital packet data) connection while in San Francisco.
CDPD? That's cool! "It's a little slow," added Mr. Dell, suddenly the ber-geek.
THE THRILL IS GONE
But the speech offered no more in the way of highlights, a disappointment to those looking for a personal dusting of Dell magic. After all, in legend Mr. Dell can loom larger than life, an industry icon if there ever was one, who built his business from selling computers out of his University of Texas dorm room into a behemoth of the Internet age, an entity that sells $40 million worth of computers online each and every day.
But as any performer knows, sometimes the magic isn't there. In this case, the subject matter -- an operating system that's already been analyzed to death -- may be the root of the evil, the reason why none of us involved can work up much excitement.
"Windows 2000 is a tremendous leap forward," Mr. Dell said. Mmm-hmmm.
Media professionals go to keynotes and speeches even though we know they're generally boring as toast. But you go because someone important is appearing in public, and might just do something newsworthy -- like throw up on a world leader, or fall off the stage.
Those political reporters have all the fun.
Tuesday morning, there were no pratfalls, there were no revelations, there was no hurling. Instead, there was just a boatload of praise for Windows 2000 from Mr. Dell, who owes no small part of his success to Microsoft operating systems. "We're migrating Dell.com to Windows 2000," Mr. Dell said.
And we were there, when it happened.
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