Rogue Wolves

Recently, Microsoft was beat up on the blog-o-sphere and in the media when a windows vista speech recognition demo went...well let's just say less than perfect.

Here is a video cast by Long Zheng who got his hands on a beta version of Vista and decided to demo it's features. The difference is his demo actually works and quite well.

The demo is very impressive and should silence the critics of Microsoft's speech software. Long Zheng has a fairly thick accent and it still was performing very well.

I made a comment on the original ill fated demo earlier that Microsoft rather than make excuses for the failed software should instead fix it and show it works....so why didn't they themselves post a screen cast like this? And I don't mean a one hour long Channel 9 video..something simple and direct like this screen cast with no marketing filter.

This is funny. Microsoft holds a Windows Vista speech recognition demo session and things hardly go well. This is the awesome doublespeak it spits out during the session:

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

The poor presenter tries to repair the situation but it goes from bad to worse. Here's a video of the event:

I feel for the Microsoft presenter. I've been in a similar situation (although not quite as devastating or as funny as this one) where nothing in your demo to the client works. It's Murphy's Law that whatever can go wrong will but only at the most inopportune time. I'm sure all you other software developers out there can agree. You can practice your demo a million times but the time you actually perform it for your audience things goes wrong.

The best way to handle these situations is to not get frustrated, embarrassed or angry. Laugh at yourself and roll with it. If you have the client laughing (with you, not at you) and make them sense that you are secure in the fact that nothing worked quite right they will feel more confident that you will get things working correctly.

What's worse, seeing someone screaming at the computer and saying "It's not my fault! It worked yesterday! I swear it did! It must be this computer, is Service Pack x installed??".

Or...

Someone taking it all in stride and laughing it off. Then explaining that this is a demo of a work in progress and jotting down notes of problems as they occur.

That second person seems a bit more stable and likely to succeed than the first guy don't you think? Don't make excuses. If things don't work then that's something that needs to be addressed instead of making excuses for it. Unfortunately, Microsoft's has made excuses for the failed demo above by blaming ambient noise and echo. Excuses don't instill confidence. Actions taken to correct the problem instill confidence.

Side Note: Microsoft's situation is a bit unique in that they needed this demo to go well. Vista has slipped several times and still doesn't look like it's coming out anytime soon. Confidence in their ability to ship is already low.

Writely Blog:

Writely is now part of Google!

Yes, we've been acquired by Google, and we're really excited about this for many, many reasons. But I can hear you saying, "I don't care why YOU'RE excited - I want to know how this change will impact ME!"

Interesting play by Google. Are they really considering trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's cash cow? Maybe in the small business/home user space but I don't think so in big business. There is also the issue of how much traction an online word processor can gain. User's tend to immediately think Microsoft Word when they need to create a document. It will be hard to undo that mind set. Also, online apps are just that...online. What happens when you want to edit documents with no internet connection? Don't tell me I have to pay for Office just to edit my documents on the road? Or install OpenOffice... Two apps for the same task doesn't work. User's want one unified tool.

What would be cool is if they offered a tool similar to TiddlyWiki then you could work on documents while offline but I'm not sure how easy this would be for end users. They would need to know to use the offline version when not online and the actual website when they are. Not pretty. Could the website be cached and some javascript executes that detects if an internet connection exists and put's the website into offline mode using cached pages? Hmm interesting...

I'm not sure where this is going yet we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure Microsoft is watching this closely and hyperventilating and you can bet they have been working on an online version of Office. Maybe Google's plan is just to get Microsoft's knickers in a twist?

Update: Here is an interesting read on the google purchase on CNN Money.com  and an even more interesting read that ties into what I was rambling about.  I like his take on how this could work utilyzing desktop applications for local editing (OpenOffice) and a web application (Writely) for when you are at a public terminal.  As long as files are synchronized between your Internet filesystem and your local file system that could work nicely.