Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 18:32:29 -0500 (CDT)
From: Rob Mayoff
To: Curt Finch <>, John Dawson <>,
Alex North-Keys <>,
Robbie Robinette <>, Tony Yen <>,
Britt Yenne <>, Jennifer Lateiner <>
Subject: story about MS development conference
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Thought you might find this amusing, and possibly uplifting (I did)...
Forwarded-by: Nev Dull
[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...
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