Hello Steve, Allez Java !
Story on MS conference in france, source Sun Employee (judge the bias for yourself)
but the press don't report this stuff so...
###
I was at the Microsoft developer conference in Paris. The attendance at the beginning
was a solid 1200 developers. 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 (which i though was
good enough!). He 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 decompiled
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 at the end. After 1 more hour of a bleeding Microsoft audience,
and of people randomly applauding and yelling "Java!", with a presentation they had to
stop short due to the speaker's 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"
Footnote
From a developer from microsoft leaving MS to go to SunSoft. He said after almost 8
years of being with the company he had "never seen such a confusion and fear of
defeat before within the company. "
fear of defeat... hmm..
###
ADE |
