Monday, February 07, 2000

What a relief. After several days of fussing, today's demo went well. From here on out the trip is easy. Seybold schmoozing and tomorrow evening's live session, and then a plane back to SFO, more jetlag, and a rendezvous with my friends, hot tub, creek and personal T1 line.

Renewal is everywhere. On Davos Newbies, Lance edited the template to show the countdown clock for Davos 2001. He asks why nothing changed. Garret says he commented it out. All is well!

Re Philip Greenspun: I'd say we couldn't possibly be more different in approach and still be philosophically compatible. I think eye candy is great, he thinks its a waste of time. Lots more differences but I want to give it some thought. One thing I like about his plan, when he makes hundreds of millions of dollars, he's going to give it to MIT so they can eliminate tuition. That's a good vision. There's a purpose in his pursuit of riches.

One more thing. I'm going to finally wear jeans to this evening's Seybold web party. I'm back in the USA, and it's my right.

***Preparation

Well today's the big day! Last night I did the equipment check. This is the podium that all the keynotes will be given from. It's actually an Ethernet hub, in addition to a bunch of other things.

It's a good thing I went for the equipment check. It took about a half hour and a call to Bierman who was standing by in California to get my laptop configured to work with the Seybold LAN. There would have been no time for this as the audience was arriving and the other speakers would be setting up too.

Windows 2000 is still a bitch to set up. In this case it wasn't totally Windows' fault, the network card on my laptop came unstuck somehow, removing and reinserting it made the LAN come alive.

Always do a run-through the night before to avoid problems when the show is live. I learned this lesson at Demo in 1993, when I was demoing IOWA (which became MacBird). The setup took five hours, thanks to our good teacher Murphy, who has a co-marketing deal with The Demo God.

After doing the run-through, I came back and deleted 2/3 of my slides. It's too ambitious to talk about Making Money in the Internet and also explaining Manila. So I decided to focus on Manila, and let them come to the DaveNet Live session tomorrow evening to find out how to make money. First I want to show them how to make love.

I also look forward to meeting Philip Greenspun. He and Roger Black are my co-keynoters. Hopefully we'll have a picture of me and Philip sharing our vision for the Web, or at least shaking hands!

Every computer industry conference that works has someone like Liz Grady to keep track of the wires, workers and egos. As I took her picture last night she told me that once before one of her speakers put her on the web. I said "Yeah Liz, it's going to happen again!"

Another lesson. The celebrities who "run" the show come and go (like Jonathan Seybold, Stewart Alsop, David Coursey, the list goes on and on) but the power is really with people like Liz who can get things done quickly. Never whine at these people. They're accustomed to it, but if you work with them, and Don't Panic, your demos will go better. You're going to be working with them for years. I learned this from Tracy Beiers, who was Stewart's Liz Grady, and my girlfriend in the early days of Agenda and Demo.

1/4/95: Demoing Software for Fun and Profit. "You must have confidence in your product, and confidence in your ability to sell it. The only way to get there is to practice, to think about demonstrations, and play Monday-morning quarterback. Refine your demo, and maybe even the product, and experiment and rehearse until you win every time."

***Other news

The Standard looks at the VA-Andover deal.

MacWEEK: Seybold editors pick hot products.

Red Herring: Davos Dispatch #4.

Qube Quorner: Week in Review.

Josh Lucas's EditThisPage.Com site makes the Top 100. Josh is a Java developer at EarthLink.