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The Real and the Unreal at PDC
PDC, October 29, 2003 There is a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" quality to almost any good tech show focused on future technology. Half the fun of such a show is the contrast between the real world you see around you and the world you see promised in glitzy presentations and slickly produced demos. Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles is no exception. On stage, Microsoft shows off the fancy new Avalon UI enhancements—the transparency examples are particularly cool—while just outside a haze of thick smoke from nearby fires coats everything. On stage, Microsoft touts the seamless and reliable communications and Web services security enabled by Indigo. Meanwhile, reliable Internet connections have been hard to come by at the show, with attendees playing musical chairs in search of the "hot" Ethernet connection or strong wireless signal. The good signals you can find put the "fast" in "fast connection." You better take care of your business fast, though, because you have no idea how long you'll be able to maintain connectivity. It's a mark of how far and how fast technology has progressed that people like me have come to expect ubiquitous and fast connectivity at a show like this—and feel no compunction about whining about it when it isn't there. Some of the technologies you're reading about in this newsletter and hearing about from the show will never see the light of day—remember Blackbird? Other parts will fall far short of expectations. Microsoft Bob jokes are requisite at events like this one. I don't believe I've been to a major Microsoft event where the poor, late, much-lamented Bob didn't rate at least one snide comment—nearly always by someone who worked for Microsoft. The rest of us have forgotten, except when reminded. Then again, I'm handwriting this opinion on a Tablet PC. The bus taking me to the show is crowded, and it would be a tight fit to write this in normal laptop mode. The technology you see presented at shows like this often does see the light of day, and it's exciting to see a technology unveiled for the first time, then follow it either to fruition or oblivion. More often than not, a technology loses a feature, or ten, along the way, and many companies are guilty of announcing features they never intend to ship to hold competitors at bay. The breadth of Microsoft's vision for the future of computing is impressive. Many of these technologies sound far out in the future, but we'll be living with the successes of these initiatives and working around their failures and shortcomings for many years to come. It's important to pay attention to the announcements Microsoft is making, and offer feedback and guidance. Now is the time to speak about the things you like and things you hate, because you'll be providing details only on implementation if you wait until it's about to ship to speak up. At the same time, it's important to keep in mind that even the best of technological improvements have the transience of a Shaq-Kobe feud-friendship-feud. Remember pong? Remember the thrill of a 1 MB hard-drive and wondering how you would ever fill up such a device? Remember when 11 MBps for wireless seemed fast? The best part about technologies you don't like is you probably won't have to live with them for long. By the way: what did ever happen to pong? About the Author |