Thursday, February 7, 2002
PC unreliability rears its ugly head again
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 12:00 PM
http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/dgillmor/dg020602.htm
From the "It seemed like a good idea at the time" department, this column by Dan Gillmor points to the ugly crossroads where reality and technology meet. Looks like a fender-bender to me! I promise the next posting will be some form of good news. ;-)
"The young woman at the technical support desk worked for Compaq, according to the name tag on her green shirt. She did not appear to be having a great day.
In a gesture designed to win friends for its iPaq handheld computers, Compaq had handed out the devices, equipped with connections to a wireless network inside the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, to several thousand corporate chief executives, high-ranking government officials and others attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. One problem: The system was broken, and its would-be users were not pleased.
Oh, it worked some of the time. But far too often, attendees -- who'd waited in long lines to get the iPaqs in the first place -- couldn't make the devices handle the promised functions, such as sending and receiving e-mail and signing up for panels. I had to reset mine repeatedly when it stopped responding. Like many others, I headed back to the support desk to ask the beleaguered tech staff for help.
No one pointed fingers, at least not officially. Compaq may have been least blameworthy. The key software was from Microsoft, whose Pocket PC operating system powers the iPaq, and Hayward-based AvantGo, which supplied a program to synchronize the devices with the central server computers. The Accenture consulting firm was the ``systems integrator,'' responsible for putting it all together."
From the "It seemed like a good idea at the time" department, this column by Dan Gillmor points to the ugly crossroads where reality and technology meet. Looks like a fender-bender to me! I promise the next posting will be some form of good news. ;-)
"The young woman at the technical support desk worked for Compaq, according to the name tag on her green shirt. She did not appear to be having a great day.
In a gesture designed to win friends for its iPaq handheld computers, Compaq had handed out the devices, equipped with connections to a wireless network inside the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, to several thousand corporate chief executives, high-ranking government officials and others attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. One problem: The system was broken, and its would-be users were not pleased.
Oh, it worked some of the time. But far too often, attendees -- who'd waited in long lines to get the iPaqs in the first place -- couldn't make the devices handle the promised functions, such as sending and receiving e-mail and signing up for panels. I had to reset mine repeatedly when it stopped responding. Like many others, I headed back to the support desk to ask the beleaguered tech staff for help.
No one pointed fingers, at least not officially. Compaq may have been least blameworthy. The key software was from Microsoft, whose Pocket PC operating system powers the iPaq, and Hayward-based AvantGo, which supplied a program to synchronize the devices with the central server computers. The Accenture consulting firm was the ``systems integrator,'' responsible for putting it all together."
