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'Not really sure why anyone would wanna do that, but that's what you can do!' Web technology in a nutshell...

alexis_fr 7y ago
Interesting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week” (3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud. Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  > or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all good things. Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors', because they want to show it as in a completely different class.
  - Austin_Conlon 7y ago
    This describes part of why I thought Steve Jobs interviews at the D conference were so interesting. Nowadays interviews with Apple executives are them just sticking to a PR script and pretending competitors don’t exist, except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      > except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi. He must be a decent stand-up comedian.
- drclau 7y ago
  As I understand it, “I don’t know why anyone would want to do that” comment was referring to showing a plane animation flying from origin to destination, while “we like IE very much ... but I’m using Netscape for this demo” was a quip and sarcasm. He was great at connecting with the audience. Another example was when he switched screens and the car website appeared instead of the flights website, the audience laughed and he said something like “we recommend them driving instead of taking a plane”.

Interesting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week” (3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud. Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.

solarkraft 7y ago
> or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all good things. Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors', because they want to show it as in a completely different class.
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  This describes part of why I thought Steve Jobs interviews at the D conference were so interesting. Nowadays interviews with Apple executives are them just sticking to a PR script and pretending competitors don’t exist, except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    > except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi. He must be a decent stand-up comedian.
drclau 7y ago
As I understand it, “I don’t know why anyone would want to do that” comment was referring to showing a plane animation flying from origin to destination, while “we like IE very much ... but I’m using Netscape for this demo” was a quip and sarcasm. He was great at connecting with the audience. Another example was when he switched screens and the car website appeared instead of the flights website, the audience laughed and he said something like “we recommend them driving instead of taking a plane”.