It has been said that two things in life are certain: death and taxes. After recent experience, I would like to suggest that there is another certainty: a live technology demonstration in front of a roomful of journalists or potential customers will crash.
Stage fright
Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb
If you`re lucky, it will go quietly and simply look as if the power supply has been cut off. If you`re not, it will return error message after error message that will require you to reboot the system. But you can be absolutely sure it will die, and the extent of the failure of your presentation is bound proportionally to either the number of onlookers or to the importance you attach to the demonstration.
As a technology journalist who gets to see a lot of demonstrations, I see it all the time. Sometimes the application suffers stage fright and dies under the scrutiny of onlookers. Sometimes it has very little to do with the application on show, but rather the other bits and pieces that it relies on.
For instance, the laptop the slide show is running on decides to go into a deep sleep from which it can`t be revived for love or money. Or the projector that flashes "working shots" of the application onto the largest surface available burns out its globe or short circuits.
The result is that the latest in mobile mini devices ends up being demonstrated to a huddle of onlookers that looks not unlike a rugby scrum.
A recent demonstration I went to at a large technology company suffered from all of the above. The two-hour demonstration included two impromptu tea breaks while the laptops and projector used for the demonstration were rebooted. It appeared they had both fallen into a fitful sleep.
Then when it came to the telephone demonstration, the phone in question would not accept the preset password. Another, shorter, tea break and the phone worked impressively. It appears someone had forgotten to correctly route the system to the phone.
Often the technology is actually really good once all is said and done, but the impression is very bad when it only works after two attempts, even if the failure was simply an administrative one.
There is perhaps no way to avoid the terrors of a live demonstration other than practising repeatedly beforehand. Running through the whole demonstration in the exact same venue and on the same equipment as planned for the live show should iron out the problems, but even then something is bound to go wrong.
I`m quite pleased I only have to watch these demonstrations and not actually do them myself. One of the perks of being a journalist I suppose.
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