Unexpected Experience

Bill Gates come down to Singapore to give a talk on Technology to Career. Knowing that he's a big name in the PC world, affecting millions of PC users, he's like a GURU.

Of course I dashed for the tickets to watch him LIVE! I was so anxious, that I kept running the schedules of that day in my mind so that I would be super early for the talk.

When we entered Suntec City Hall, the open hall was only lukewarm full of audience, which was surprising because the event was about to begin in about 30mins, we were told to come 2hrs before the talk to grab "good" seats.

We were greeted by friendly microsoft staff and showed us the way to our seats and the 5 gigantic screens showing syncronissed images of different aspect of microsoft was on with music and all... *excited*

However, we noticed that the images seemed to be abit off-color and less "sharp" and captivating to a generally audience. Some of the content was pretty interesting where they showed how undergraduate students around the world congregated to crack codes or write new programs.

When the guru finally came on-stage after about an 45mins wait, he looked tired and carried out a less than satisfactory presentation, Q&A was disappointing as well, I expected a huge BOOM of information, new releases, technology of tomorrow pushing todays' frontier kind of session, instead, it was a dry 45min presentation, with slides cramped with words and I can hardly make out which part of the presentation he was actually talking about.

*disappointed*

Next came a 45min Demo of the NEW MS features..... u would expect a professional display of tools, functions, programming additions that would ROCK the world... instead, it started with new features on the MSN messenger!!! can u believe it?? Oh u can now send cutsy emoticons that are animated to ur frens online! Hello?? WHO in the 6000 audience would actually be INTERESETED in that?? less than 0.1%? Next was the showcase of the media home center which 'everything' can be controled by the remote... heellooo.... doesnt my home DVD player does the SAME thing? alternatively I can always buy a all-in-one control if i'm 'desperate' to control everything.... and who is really interested to chat with a friend on msn massenger WHILE watching tv?? isn't it like super irritating to have your friends popping you msg when you are watching Desperate Housewives or CSI?

Was Longhorn something to croon about?? NAH.... unless you havent been opening ur eyes to the many developments around the world... you may think that LH is big deal, but honestly, all those features that was demonstrated on the LH, was already a reality in the OS X. It did not impress me one bit!

Instead, the lack of professionalism in their delivery has drove me further away from the PC. I nearly wanted to melt into my seat when he showed off the 'transparency' settings between 2 windows.... yes its a cool feature... but its not cool when u try to point it out... its cool when u show it and let the audience WOAH at it.... someone needs to teach them how not to cramp so many points into a powerpoint slide... (else why would they call it powerPOINT?, they shd have called it powerpointS).

It is unimaginable that the event is so poorly thought of, the delivery lacks innovation, creativity and most of all the power to convince.

We left the venue feeling that using a mac is definitely the BETTER choice!

here's the sms conversations that took place that day captured on otterman's blog.