John Donovan said he and other executives flew to Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus to give the handset maker a "crash course in wireless networking." The pros

John Donovan said he and other executives flew to Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus to give the handset maker a "crash course in wireless networking." The prospect of nitty gritty communications issues being communicated by executives is possibly frightening, but I suppose a CTO could be briefed up on the issues. The issues they mention, e.g. message querying, sound more like a "we don't do this particular operation very well right now, please stop hurting us" talk. These can be fantastically productive. Back in the '90s I was with a group that got one of these from Sybase. (They called it a talk on optimization.) The presenter knew their products warts inside and out, started us down the road with the big, common ones, then worked with us on our specifics. No where in the printed documentation would you find this knowledge, but once you had it passed to you orally you could dramatically improve performance. I have never seen a project benefit more from a half day meeting.