Fun_People Archive
22 Sep
Hmmmm. Don't go out alone, folks.

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 97 16:42:09 -0700
To: Fun_People
Subject: Hmmmm.  Don't go out alone, folks.

Forwarded-by: Nev Dull <nev@bostic.com>

[Forwards truncated deliberately.]

A Sun friend passed this story on -- it amused me greatly:

Story cut and pasted as follows:

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!


XXXX

PS: I was the guy who yelled "GO JAVA!" .... hee hee hee...

© 1997 Peter Langston