Bill Spornitz on Tue, 12 Feb 2002 17:36:01 +0100 (CET)
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[Nettime-bold] Re: the wireless future at Davos Uptown
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Title: Re: the wireless future at Davos
Uptown
It may just be the Cariboo[1] metabolites floating in my
bloodstream fogging my mardi gras morning, but I'm having a hard time
believing what I'm reading here.
You're telling me that these people are so cynical as to hand out
a stupid and useless piece of garbage to the world's decision makers,
proudly print their names on the tote bags and that the system failure
as regards this deployment was *enterprise-wide*?
Wait a minute...
I went to the AvantGo website and they tell me that
28 of the Fortune 100
(whatever that is) use AvantGo
solutions
with clients like NASA and FORD and the United States Senate.
See? They are a real company.
I went to the Accenture website and they told me that
Accenture has the
global resources and a collaborative network of businesses and
capabilities to deliver innovative solutions for our
clients.
Innovative solutions are what we need in an ever-changing world,
that's for sure... and collaborations...
Then I went to the Microsoft website and they told me that
Microsoft's vision
is to empower people through great software - any time, any place and
on any device. As the worldwide leader in software for personal and
business computing, Microsoft strives to produce innovative products
and services that meet our customers' evolving needs. At the same
time, we understand that long-term success is about more than just
making great products.
Clearly, even the great and powerful Oz deserves to be empowered
through great software - any time, any place and on any device - on
devices like the ipaq (imac?) btw, Compaq tells us that
Ipaq is a family
of innovative, personal devices which let you take advantage of he
Internet, make life easier and keep you in control.
See? The great Lord Bono (did you see him at the superbowl? Was
he sweating all over the american flag? Is that a slur?) anyway, _all_
our Lords and Ladies need to be in control, from anywhere, on any
device, plus you gotta figure in their *evolving needs* - this would
include further empowerment and innovation, no?
Actually it's pretty clear. It's a crisis of responsibility,
isn't it? - I imagine down at porto alegre people were doing a lot of
talking about taking responsibility. At Davos Uptown, not even the
major sponsors have a popcorn-fart of a clue about that most
superficial and banal responsibility - the responsibility of not
wasting other peoples' valuable time and resources. Twisted Cynical
Bastards.
grumpily
b
[1] Cariboo - a fortified wine served in mass quantities at the
Festival du Voyageur, on all this week, up here in the Ether
City...
At 9:46 PM -0800 2/10/02, Brad DeLong wrote:
> And
>did you get the free Compaq WinCE handheld?
Yes...
>Did yours work?
No. But I didn't really expect it to. By the time I picked mine up,
the
earnest person behind the desk was telling me to (a) let it
synchronize
often, (b) stay still while it synchronized, (c) be sure to try to
synchronize only where you would have a good signal, (d) that
under the
conference load the systems were proving "temperamental,"
and (e) not to
try to use it to send email.
...
The outside of the ipaq bag has--in big
letters--Compaq, Microsoft,
Accenture. I find myself wondering just what they were thinking in
selling
the Davos-in-NY people a meeting-planner-and-wireless-communicator
that
chokes when it tries to send wireless email, has a mean-time-to-crash
of
15 minutes, and has software sufficiently unstable that crash number
4
wipes key parts of its software installation and puts it into a
brain-dead
state. Did the Accenture people not test
it at all? Did they fail to test
it under anything like the load it would get during the meeting?
Why
would Microsoft want its Windows CE operating system associated with
such
an unstable applications package as the AvantGo system used by
Accenture?
Why would Microsoft want WindowsCE to be demonstrated on a computer
like
the ipaq that apparently doesn't have the
horsepower or the wireless
bandwidth to satisfy the one-second or even the ten-second rule? Why
is
Compaq associating its name with software
companies like Microsoft and
consultancies like Accenture that
overpromise what its machines can
actually deliver?
Unless the average experience was very
different from mine, a lot of
people left that meeting thinking that neither Compaq, Microsoft,
nor
Accenture should be trusted with any part
of Our Digital Future...