Post-winHEC Post
WinHEC 2007 seems to have gone well. UMPC exposure was pretty-decent. Bill Gates showed off UMPCs in his keynote. I presented a session on UMPCs (somewhat ambiguously titled ‘UMPC Ecosystem’ – I’ll post a link to the slides when they become public) and assisted my colleague Jeremy White on his UMPC ‘chalk talk’ (titled ‘Origami Experience and UMPCs’). Plus we had a UMPC booth at the tech ‘pavilion’ demonstrating several UMPCs to a continuous stream of the enthused, the curious, and the plain ol’ confused. After several days of non-stop reiteration and messaging of the UMPC potential, it was a highpoint to hear a member of the press in the audience speak up and say, “I finally get it – it’s a PC. That’s great. And so much less confusing than the previous messaging”. A similar sentiment was expressed in a nice little follow-up article (worth-reading) by David DeJean (InformationWeek) titled “Ok, So I Was Wrong About Origami”.
[Personal-Lesson-Learnt-Dept.]: Before I went to WinHEC, I had received the standard internal pre-conference warnings guidance to be careful about what I said in such a public setting, and especially about what I said to the press. Despite my initial skepticism (“How bad can it be?” mused the uninitiated author, naïvely…J), I’m sorry to say the advice was spot on. Some of the subsequent press reports I’ve read about my session feel positively surreal (especially as I sit there comparing what it was I said and intended to what it was folks apparently heard and reported…). Even stranger is the bizarre chinese whisper manner in which the reports are evolving, as secondary sites glean material from previous reports and then rehash/rerelease into the ether, introducing genetic drift (aka mutations) in real time. So, if reports are to be believed, in addition to actively giving interviews at WinHEC (which I wasn’t aware I was doing, unless open Q&A countsJ) I also apparently made major formal announcements about future UMPC specifications (and to think I thought I was just talking about what’s possible J)! If you do have an intense desire to read WinHEC reports, Mary Jo (ZDNet) got it largely right and you can kind-of skim this piece by Todd Bishop (Seattle PI). Anything more sensationalist, I advise taking with a pinch of salt…J. [Next time though, no prizes for guessing who’ll be watching what he says like a hawk…J]
Hopefully though, at the end of the day, we made some dent into some of the existing UMPC confusion, made some incremental additions to the overall UMPC momentum, and possibly even won a few new UMPC converts... so all in all, seems to have gone well.
