Microsoft’s Bill Gates’ opening keynote at CES did not go entirely to plan, but, then again, when does it ever when Windows is powering the show?
“Bill Gates’s legendary luck failed him during his keynote presentation at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas,” Iain Thomson reports for vnunet.com. “His demonstration of Microsoft Media Center crashed during the presentation on integrating digital photography, and later a Microsoft product manager failed to access the internet with a Tablet PC.”
“The presentation started on a jokey theme, with late-night TV host Conan O’Brien presenting a mock version of his own show and a video diary of his and Bill’s ‘lost weekend’ in Las Vegas. ‘I got too drunk, I woke up with a hooker,’ O’Brien said. ‘Bill got too drunk, he woke up with an Apple computer,'” Thomson reports.
Full article here.
rogozin,
That’s a great little commercial. I’m “raising” my nieces and nephews on these commercials. They are so used to their parents argueing over the latest Windows virus, bug. They love my eMac. I’ll buy one for them someday, just my little contribution to world peace.
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“And to be fair, the Clicker incident wasn’t Steve, it was that Canadian in the Blue Shirt we all know and love…”
Who’s that?
(magic word is person) scary…
Yeah and dont forget the time when SJ got so pissed at the Mac he was using he threw the camera out into the crowd becasue it wouldnt sync up….
By the way, their Media Player and streaming totally sucks. I can’t get it to play. It plays for 2 seconds and then spends the next 2 minutes trying to “buffer”.
I forwarded this to every PC user I know. Does that make me uncharitable?
NoMacForYou, Steve Jobs did NOT throw the camera into the crowd! When the camera didn’t sync with iPhoto, Steve noticed the camera was dead. He then tossed it underhand to his assistant sitting in the front row hoping he could fix it. After a few minutes, Steve saw his assistant shake his head indicating the camera was hopelessly broken, so Steve continued on with the rest of the presentation.
iPhoto and OS X were certainly not at fault for the problem.
You must give credit to Microsoft for having the balls to prominently post this fiasco on their home page. It is an indication that these problems are seen as being standard operating procedures.
I always hate it when content is in WMP too. Real or Quicktime is sooo much better.
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-!!!!
(*snort*)
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-
He deserves it, that rat bastard.
This story reminded me of a friend who began showing off his new $3000 HP Media Center PC set-up one day. He began by playing an archived copy of “The West Wing” and then while it was playing, tried to switch out of the TV functionality and do something else (all the while talking about how Microsoft did a really slick job with the Media Center).
Somewhere in the process, Windows screwed up and suddenly, you had two audio tracks of the “West Wing” episode playing at the same time (but only one video). The tracks were out of sync by a few seconds, as if someone started playing back two recordings at different times and turned the speakers to full on both.
Obviously, this was not supposed to be happening, so he tried to stop the episode from playing….except that he couldn’t. After a few more seconds of trying to kill the now unwanted episode of West Wing, he suddenly said he might have been hit by a virus or a worm, and he need to run a full virus scan on his system so he would have to show off the media center functionality later.
You could not make this up if it were fiction…except with Microsoft, you don’t need to.
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Anyone notice this video is now down? maybe theyre busy editing out all the bugs, revisionist truth at its best
Hah. I tried to watch the video in both 100K and 300K and neither worked at all almost. The picture kept freezing for minutes at a time while the audio went on. Then everything would stop to rebuffer. NOW, they have pulled it entirely from the website and say that it will be available later today. What a bad impression of their buggy loser technology. This wasn’t even close to being “good enough”.
[Anyone notice this video is now down?]
Thanks for the link Ary.
Is there a different, more reliable source for this?
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It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody at Microsoft gets fired for allowing this to happen. That stuff won’t get covered in the media news, however.
dang it, i was half way through the video when i had to go to bed last night, and this morning, my dad took my ibook to work, and i can’t watch the rest of it on this mac cuz it is down, that sucks
LETS GO FLASH IPOD!
btw, i thought Conan was very funny, and looked like a giant sitting next to small mousy bill, who was at least a foot and a half below conan
I had it stored in the Media Player’s “Favorites” so I could see it quickly whenever it came back from the dead. Now, it just says “Please, Stand By” in bold letters with classical music in the background for 3 mins.
This same thing happened to Apple in… ah… um… no… wait… this never happened to Apple.
My guesses are that their almighty powerful Windows server got overloaded with hits from Mac users looking for these precious on-stage Bill moments. Knowing this, they are probably editing out the “undesirable” parts, thus reducing the number of viewers and along with it, the server load.
This doubly stinks for Microsoft being that they are trying to capitalize upon the consumer Electronics Show. All these people trying to see all of these great MEDIA products from Microsoft, and they can’t even stream a simple lo-res video that is produced, edited and streamed by themselves. No one else to blame.
Microsoft: Crapware for the next century!
Hobbes
But Steve Jobs had a problem once when showing off “Preview”. He wanted to show how fast preview was scrolling through thousends of pages, and the friggin’ thing just didn’t want to stop scrolling, lol.
“Hopefully it won’t start all over again… oops”.
That was at the WWDC for Panther. He had a script rigged up to show how fast you can scroll through a PDF. So whatever problems he had it was with the demonstration script, not a feature on the final shipping software. Either way he managed to really emphasize how fast Preview scrolled through a long complex PDF. Nothing crashed.
Windows is so fucking great that even Microsoft’s CEO can’t bloody use it!
CLASSIC COMEDY – INFRONT OF THE WORLDS IT PRESS TOO!!!
LLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL!
Great one Bill!
Keep this up and not even you will want to use windows!!!!
Hey all – click on the link!
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/ces2005/default.mspx
It seems that the ‘video of Bill’s Cock-up Keynote is not available now’
I assume someone in the Mac Business Unit at M$ HQ is editing out all the bloppers in final cut Pro HD!!!
LOL!!!!!
This is obviously all a comedic mock up, meant to show Bill’s humourous side. Family Guy would be waaay funnier, and less dorky.
Does MS even use their own products?? Do they even TRY?!?! Good grief; how could such a rich company pull off such an unprepared and unprofessional demonstration at such a high-profile event?!?!
Imagine a global auto maker doing a high-profile demonstration at the Tokyo or Detroit auto shows, and having several of their vehicles break down on stage. It’d be utter disaster, the auto maker would be RUINED. Yet somehow MS does the software industry equivalent and lives another day.
Apple, for God’s sake CAPITALIZE ON THIS!! When the company CEO can’t even make his own products work, something is very, very wrong.
“Apple, for God’s sake CAPITALIZE ON THIS!! When the company CEO can’t even make his own products work, something is very, very wrong.”
I don’t think Microsoft’s CEO is Lord Bill. I believe he gave that to our buddy Steve Ballmer in 2000 (could be wrong). I might be wrong on this too, but I think Bill is the lead software architect (hmmm… reminiscient of The Matrix?). And he’s the Chairman of MS, not the CEO… but I could be wrong.
Dark Side,
Yeah I probably botched whatever Billy’s current position is, but the point is the same. He’s the man you think of when you mention MS. He better know what’s going on, especially when doing high-profile demos. If he can’t make it work, nobody can.
Could you imagine a Sony executive doing a high-profile PlayStation demo & have things go so wrong? Not in a million years.
It makes you wonder how things really are inside MS when they can’t even get the demos right. Remember how sick Apple was when Amelio stepped in, yet nobody knew until later? Call me nuts but I firmly believe that MS’s Longhorn will end up being a direct equivalent of Apple’s Copland, and that this botched demo is just a symptom of MS’s real current health.
Maybe these bllopers will land here:
http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html