PC Expo show report: day two (continued) and day three
New York is an interesting city with plenty of things to look at, do, and,frankly, smell. While part of me will always wonder what it would be liketo live in this throbbing metropolis, I don't quite understand some thingsabout this place, such as
June 19, 1997
New York is an interesting city with plenty of things to look at, do, and,frankly, smell. While part of me will always wonder what it would be liketo live in this throbbing metropolis, I don't quite understand some thingsabout this place, such as the unbelievable number of Lincoln Town Cars andthe yellow taxi cabs that whip around like gnats. It's cool, basically.
One interesting exchange with a taxi driver:
"St. Moritz" (that's the hotel we were staying at)
"Yes"
"No, St. Moritz"
"Yes, they're all the same"
"No, St. Moritz"
"The cabs are all the same"
"SAINT MORITZ"
"Yes"
"Just drive"
"Sorry, I am new"
Wow, a newbie taxi driver.
Our entourage of Big Tent and Wugnet personnel left the show Wednesday after itclosed again and waded through the 175,000 PC Expo attendees that hadspilled out onto the streets around the Javitz Center. We ate dinner aftera long walk (it was pointless trying to find a cab). Adam, Joel, Joe, andI headed to Times Square again and caught a movie (no, not that kind ofmovie: we saw "Scream"). After we got back to the room, I stayed up until4 a.m. working on our upcoming WebBoard install.
Needless to say, 8 a.m. came hard, but a miracle happened today: we madeit to a keynote address. No, really. Ironically, it was really bad. KimPolese of Marimba gave a hesitant address to a half-full room of semi-conscious attendees. I wish I could tell you what it was about, but Islipped into a coma about three minutes into her PowerPoint slide demo. Oneinteresting note, though: Polese, to her, credit, doesn't believe that"dumb" diskless terminals make any sense. As she pointed out, hard drivesand RAM are inexpensive and valuable: why would users want to do withoutthem?
After the keynote, Joe and I headed up to the press room to meet withKeith Furman, Wugnet's Webmaster. Keith has some great ideas about addingMicrosoft Personalization Server to our Web server and I expect that we'llbe collaborating on some projects in the future. The rest of the day wastaken up by meetings and some show presentations, particularly Apple's plansfor the future. Apple has some nice technology in the works and it will be interesting to see what they do with it.
We planned to leave New York in the middle of the afternoon but thingsdidn't go according to plan as usual. After eating, Joel, Joe, and I headedup to our room to get our bags and leave. The door was jammed and eventually a hotel employee had to literally break through the door to letus get our bags and get out of there. Adam was staying in New York for another night and was obviously excited about the gaping hole in his door.Joel, Joe, and I then did our own version of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" as we tried to figure out a way to get back to Pennsylvania(Joel lives there and Joe and I are going to fly home from Allentown onSunday). I won't bore you with the details, but we finally got on a trainthat was only delayed an hour and made it out of town.
All in all, the show was a big success. While there were no big productannouncements per se, we came away with the strong sense that the industryis moving in the right direction. I didn't get to meet everyone I'd hopedto--it was just too busy--but there's always Fall Comdex to look forward to. We'll publish our show photos on the Internet Nexus early next week
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