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


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...