07 President's Message for 2007-01-28

James King, John Froehlich and I went to the VISTA/OFFICE 2007 Launch Event at the Boston Convention Center on Wednesday, 24 January 2007.  We can't fault MS's hospitality, but the execution and set up left something to be desired.

On arriving at the Center, which is a marvel of engineering and utility, we were faced with a line that would have please Moses at the Red Sea.  It folded over about 4 times initially then evolved into one long line that spanned half the Center width.  When we finally got to the stalls housing the "registrators", I found that I was not registered even though I had copied part of an email to that effect and presented it to the nice lady at the laptop.  Ditto for John Froehlich.  James had been smart enough to copy the Bar-Code figure at the bottom of his email, but he had also been phoned to confirm his attendance ... I had not.

When we, and a few other miscreants, asked for help from a young MS Marketeer, we were told we might be able to get in as a 'walk-in".    Well we finally got in after the line to end all lines had shrunk to almost zero.

Up in the main meeting room we saw the usual inspired presentation of the wonders of VISTA and one of the OFFICE 2007 applications that demonstrated that a business person could link up with resources all over the Universe, reduce it to a few graphs, and as they say in French "viola".  All you have to do is figure out how to open MS Explorer or whatever it's called in psycho-OS.

My overall impression while waiting for the crowd to exit the back of the room (MS Marketing has to take courses in Crowd Control, Queuing Theory, and Event Registration), was "I don't know people that smart so as to replicate the example of gathering information from the Universe to determine if their business is making a profit".  Like kids at Christmas, VISTA users are likely to unwrap the product and play with the box.

But then, what the hell do I know.

Frank Butash
CtAUG 2007-01-28

P.S. Plenty of Blueberry Muffins, but NO BAGELS!  Froehlich and I needed grief counseling.  I spent some time with a "VO7" (my contraction for VISTA OFFICE 2007... wasn't that a Seagram product?) expert in the area roped off for them behind black curtained fence.  All we succeeded in doing after about 30 minutes was pee each other off.  Then I went looking for bagels.


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Frank Butash, Consultant/Educator, FrankButash@msn.com