No, I'm beginning to think he'll need it to pull himself
out of the hole he's getting into :->
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[some info removed to protect the inocennt :->]
Yesterday:
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
proceded to bash java for all its weakenesses. 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 decompilated 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!
On a more serious level, i was surprised by their lack of "network" or
Internet vision. Webification of applications is surely in their
products but they did not talk about it in that way, and the
philosophy and way of presenting things was surprinsingly desktop
centric, even for distributed software. Their vision must be "the
desktop is the computer"
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