Ever had a piece of your code fail miserably on stage in front of the world? Larry Osterman at Microsoft recently did (he works on the audio team) and wrote about it.
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Larry says “it’s my bug”
Published by Robert Scoble
I give you a front-row seat on the future. Focusing most of my efforts now on next-generation augmented reality and artificial intelligence, AKA "mixed reality." SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER: http://clevermoe.com/scobleizer-news/ BUY OUR NEW BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Transformation-Robert-Scoble/dp/1539894444 "The Fourth Transformation: How augmented reality and artificial intelligence will change everything." WATCH MY LATEST SPEECHES: State of VR with Philip Rosedale (done in VR itself, very cool): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zAA1EVGUZU At GEOINT, June 2017: http://trajectorymagazine.com/glimpse-new-world/ Augmented World Expo, June 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4xHILvLD8E At Leade.rs, April 2017: https://youtu.be/52_0JshgjXI +++++++++++ BIO: Scoble gives you a front-row seat on the future. Literally. He had the first ride in the first Tesla. Siri was launched in his house. He's been the first to share all sorts of technologies and companies with you, from Flipboard to Pandora to Instagram. Today he's focusing on mixed reality, AKA "next-generation augmented reality" which will include a new user interface for EVERYTHING in your life (IoT, Smart Cities, driverless cars, robots, drones, etc). That's based on his view thanks to his past experience as futurist at Rackspace. Best place to find Scoble? On his Facebook profile at https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble He has been a technology blogger since 2000, was one of five people who built Microsoft's Channel 9 video blog/community, worked at Fast Company Magazine running its TV efforts, and has been part of technology media businesses since 1993. ++++++++ SPEAKER PITCH: Apple and Facebook now have revealed their Augmented Reality strategies, which means your business needs one too. Rely on Robert Scoble, the world's top authority on AR, to bring to your conference what businesses should do next. SPEECH ABSTRACT #1: TITLE: The Fourth Transformation: What's next in mixed reality (AR and AI) and the future of technology? Here's an example of this talk at Leade.rs in Paris in April, 2017: https://youtu.be/52_0JshgjXI Why "the Fourth Transformation?" Soon we will have phones and glasses that do full on augmented reality. Everything you look at will potentially be augmented. This world is coming in late 2017 with a new iPhone from Apple, amongst other products. Microsoft is betting everything on its HoloLens glasses that do mixed reality and the industry is spending many billions of dollars in R&D and funding new companies like Magic Leap. This future will be the user interface for IoT, Smart Cities, autonomous cars, robots, drones, and your TV. This is a big deal and Robert will take you through what mixed reality is and how it will change every business. Learn more about Robert's speaking style and contact his agent at http://odemanagement.com/robert-scoble/Robert-Scoble.html ++++++++ SPEECH ABSTRACT #2: "The Next Two Clicks of Moore's Law." Over the next four years, or two clicks of Moore's Law, a ton about our technology world will change. Scoble will bring you the best from his travels visiting R&D labs, startups, and innovators around the world. He views the world through his rose-colored-mixed-reality glasses, which will be the new user interface for self driving cars, Smart Cities, IoT, and many other things in our world. He'll send you off with some lessons for companies both large and small. ++++++++ SPEECH ABSTRACT #3: "Personalized Meaning: What is Augmented Reality For?" As we enter a far more technological world where even cars drive themselves, I predict we'll see a blowback toward the analog, more authentic world. What role does augmented reality play in both worlds? Get Scoble's insight into where augmented reality is going, see tons of real-world demos, and understand what he means by 'personalized meaning.' CONTACT: If you are looking to contact me, email is best: scobleizer@gmail.com. ++++++++ ENDORSEMENTS: IZEA Top 25 Tech Influencers: https://izea.com/2017/07/07/25-top-tech-influencers/ Time: One of the top 140 Twitterers! FT: One of the five most influential Twitterers! Inc. Top 5 on list of Tech Power Players You Need to Know: http://www.inc.com/john-rampton/30-power-players-in-tech-you-need-to-know.html Next Reality: #4 on top 50 AR influencer list: https://next.reality.news/news/nr50-next-realitys-50-people-watch-augmented-mixed-reality-0177454/ View all posts by Robert Scoble
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Failing miserably in front of the world is what CEOs are afraid of, when it comes to blogs and video blogging.
I see the blog moving toward a web conferencing platform, not static text posts, but podcasts and video.
But CEOs must be brave enough to go ahead and make some public mistakes as they experiment in the new media.
If you fail, but were trying to connect with your constituents, your stakeholders, your customers, I think the public will not only be forgiving, but you will increase your humanity, your credibility, tear down the wall of hierarchy and elitism, ala naked conversations.
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Failing miserably in front of the world is what CEOs are afraid of, when it comes to blogs and video blogging.
I see the blog moving toward a web conferencing platform, not static text posts, but podcasts and video.
But CEOs must be brave enough to go ahead and make some public mistakes as they experiment in the new media.
If you fail, but were trying to connect with your constituents, your stakeholders, your customers, I think the public will not only be forgiving, but you will increase your humanity, your credibility, tear down the wall of hierarchy and elitism, ala naked conversations.
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Yah just gotta love the stock ‘lie-and-say-whatever-fits-the-mood’ Wagged PR response: ‘ambient noise’, that in a silent room, when even Larry saying it be an incorrect calculation and concurrency timing issue, a real bug.
the bug was fixed on more recent Vista builds than the one they were using for the demo
Ummmmm, here’s a stupid question, if this was a known bug, and so easily deconstructed, why not use the FIXED code for demos?
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Yah just gotta love the stock ‘lie-and-say-whatever-fits-the-mood’ Wagged PR response: ‘ambient noise’, that in a silent room, when even Larry saying it be an incorrect calculation and concurrency timing issue, a real bug.
the bug was fixed on more recent Vista builds than the one they were using for the demo
Ummmmm, here’s a stupid question, if this was a known bug, and so easily deconstructed, why not use the FIXED code for demos?
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“Yah just gotta love the stock ‘lie-and-say-whatever-fits-the-mood’ Wagged PR response: ‘ambient noise’, that in a silent room, when even Larry saying it be an incorrect calculation and concurrency timing issue, a real bug.”
Did you use the Vista speech recognition engine to enter that sentence?
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“Yah just gotta love the stock ‘lie-and-say-whatever-fits-the-mood’ Wagged PR response: ‘ambient noise’, that in a silent room, when even Larry saying it be an incorrect calculation and concurrency timing issue, a real bug.”
Did you use the Vista speech recognition engine to enter that sentence?
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Not quite, but here’s my take… 🙂
Let’s set Wagged PR response: “ambient noise”, so double delete the killer bug reports, select all “silent room”, double the.
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Not quite, but here’s my take… 🙂
Let’s set Wagged PR response: “ambient noise”, so double delete the killer bug reports, select all “silent room”, double the.
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If you look at the video, the “delete” and “select all” commands were recognized but the speech recognition engine didn’t execute them.
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If you look at the video, the “delete” and “select all” commands were recognized but the speech recognition engine didn’t execute them.
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Good on Larry for being man enough to stand up and take the responsibility for this.
This was one of the things that really annoys me with aspects of Microsoft – the excuse layer. I particularly recall the Sidebar gadget guys who hid behind their PM and his pitiful excuses when they admitted the Windows Sidebar wouldn’t support WPF. A true professional can admit when they cock up and have the gumption to set out to fix it.
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Good on Larry for being man enough to stand up and take the responsibility for this.
This was one of the things that really annoys me with aspects of Microsoft – the excuse layer. I particularly recall the Sidebar gadget guys who hid behind their PM and his pitiful excuses when they admitted the Windows Sidebar wouldn’t support WPF. A true professional can admit when they cock up and have the gumption to set out to fix it.
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Christopher, there were good reasons for why they were running an older Vista build, as I said – there were a number of other mitigating factors that were involved.
All of those mitigating factors together MIGHT have been enough to tank the demo, but there’s no question that the audio bug overwhelmed most of them.
There’s no point in playing the “blame game”. There were lots of things that could have been done to mitigate the bug, but it doesn’t matter.
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Christopher, there were good reasons for why they were running an older Vista build, as I said – there were a number of other mitigating factors that were involved.
All of those mitigating factors together MIGHT have been enough to tank the demo, but there’s no question that the audio bug overwhelmed most of them.
There’s no point in playing the “blame game”. There were lots of things that could have been done to mitigate the bug, but it doesn’t matter.
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So I guess now Scoble is going to tell us that keyboards are outdated.
🙂
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So I guess now Scoble is going to tell us that keyboards are outdated.
🙂
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Yeah, I’ve had that happen. Customer was doing a demo of my app for their users and wanted me there. Not sure why I needed to be there — it was a fairly basic introduction to the app, but I guess they thought one of the users might have a technical question. The app was pretty robust, but there was one reported bug that I wasn’t able to duplicate, so of course I thought, “Well that’s the only thing that could possibly go wrong…”
And a tiny little voice saying, “It’s a demo. Of course it’s going to blow up. Demos are like holding a metal rod above your head while standing in an open field during a thunderstorm and screaming, ‘HIT ME!!! HIT MEEEEEEE!!!'”
Demo day arrives; I’m introduced as the developer. I take my seat wayyyy in the back of the room. Pay no attention to me. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Customer starts demo, logs in, app throws spectacular ASP .NET error page.
Time slows down. Tick.
Everyone in the room slowly turns to look at ME. Tick… tick…
Kind of expected to wake up at that point, to sit bolt upright in bed and exclaim, “Man! That was a horrible dream! Only that didn’t happen.
At some point the “oh crap” timer expired, and I managed to make some helpful suggestion, like closing all the browser windows and starting over again. (Which is one notch above saying, “Did you try rebooting?”)
Everything went perfectly after that.
(Later, I discovered it was a side effect of the demo account we were using, plus lack of exception handling, which made me feel a tiny bit better that it was only 82% boneheaded and not 100% boneheaded on my part.)
It was not a fun thing, but I can recommend the experience, because it
1) makes you more determined to write better code and not repeat the experience,
2) makes you less afraid of failing, when you find out that the world actually doesn’t end after all, and
3) is humbling.
I think it’s what they used to call a “character-building” experience, back in the days of yore, when people actually took responsibiility for their failures. 🙂
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Yeah, I’ve had that happen. Customer was doing a demo of my app for their users and wanted me there. Not sure why I needed to be there — it was a fairly basic introduction to the app, but I guess they thought one of the users might have a technical question. The app was pretty robust, but there was one reported bug that I wasn’t able to duplicate, so of course I thought, “Well that’s the only thing that could possibly go wrong…”
And a tiny little voice saying, “It’s a demo. Of course it’s going to blow up. Demos are like holding a metal rod above your head while standing in an open field during a thunderstorm and screaming, ‘HIT ME!!! HIT MEEEEEEE!!!'”
Demo day arrives; I’m introduced as the developer. I take my seat wayyyy in the back of the room. Pay no attention to me. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Customer starts demo, logs in, app throws spectacular ASP .NET error page.
Time slows down. Tick.
Everyone in the room slowly turns to look at ME. Tick… tick…
Kind of expected to wake up at that point, to sit bolt upright in bed and exclaim, “Man! That was a horrible dream! Only that didn’t happen.
At some point the “oh crap” timer expired, and I managed to make some helpful suggestion, like closing all the browser windows and starting over again. (Which is one notch above saying, “Did you try rebooting?”)
Everything went perfectly after that.
(Later, I discovered it was a side effect of the demo account we were using, plus lack of exception handling, which made me feel a tiny bit better that it was only 82% boneheaded and not 100% boneheaded on my part.)
It was not a fun thing, but I can recommend the experience, because it
1) makes you more determined to write better code and not repeat the experience,
2) makes you less afraid of failing, when you find out that the world actually doesn’t end after all, and
3) is humbling.
I think it’s what they used to call a “character-building” experience, back in the days of yore, when people actually took responsibiility for their failures. 🙂
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Larry… uh… this Fin Anaylst Meeting wasn’t a surprise, was it? I mean, surely this demo had to have been rehearsed numerous times,right? Surely Microsoft doesn’t go into such an important meeting not having tested their demo in the enviroment in which it will be run live, does it? If not, that says quite a bit about the test criteria.
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Larry… uh… this Fin Anaylst Meeting wasn’t a surprise, was it? I mean, surely this demo had to have been rehearsed numerous times,right? Surely Microsoft doesn’t go into such an important meeting not having tested their demo in the enviroment in which it will be run live, does it? If not, that says quite a bit about the test criteria.
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Excuses excuses. When the program printed “select all” instead of executing it, it could not be attributed to echo.
When the program printed “delete” 5 seconds after the word was uttered, that cannot be attributed to echo.
This software is not “beta” or “temperamental”. It’s just crap. Microsoft always overhypes and underdelivers 99% of the time. You can’t blame a track record like that on any single overworked programmer taking time to fix a single random bug.
In other news, Ten-year-old Apple Newton beats latest Windows UMPC:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/handhelds/0,39029444,49282366,00.htm
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Excuses excuses. When the program printed “select all” instead of executing it, it could not be attributed to echo.
When the program printed “delete” 5 seconds after the word was uttered, that cannot be attributed to echo.
This software is not “beta” or “temperamental”. It’s just crap. Microsoft always overhypes and underdelivers 99% of the time. You can’t blame a track record like that on any single overworked programmer taking time to fix a single random bug.
In other news, Ten-year-old Apple Newton beats latest Windows UMPC:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/handhelds/0,39029444,49282366,00.htm
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If you grew up working on a Unix machine like I did, working in Terminal.app isn’t just a walk down memory lane, it’s more productive.
Pak Car
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If you grew up working on a Unix machine like I did, working in Terminal.app isn’t just a walk down memory lane, it’s more productive.
Pak Car
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but it doesn’t matter…
It doesn’t matter? What? Yes it does. And not so much a ‘blame game’ as more finding out what really went wrong and how to fix it, and prevent such from ever happening again. Blame-gaming oft times never gets to the root of the problem, easier to slice heads, than to deal with systematic fundamental problems.
It matters, as a look back can help fix things. Other companies get sued when they ignore known defects. In the military, they pour over battlefield analysis, almost down to the molecule.
The customer ain’t gonna care a simple microscopic iota about all the “taking responsibility character-building” experiences. So save that justifcational psychobabble for internal process analysis, just make it work.
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but it doesn’t matter…
It doesn’t matter? What? Yes it does. And not so much a ‘blame game’ as more finding out what really went wrong and how to fix it, and prevent such from ever happening again. Blame-gaming oft times never gets to the root of the problem, easier to slice heads, than to deal with systematic fundamental problems.
It matters, as a look back can help fix things. Other companies get sued when they ignore known defects. In the military, they pour over battlefield analysis, almost down to the molecule.
The customer ain’t gonna care a simple microscopic iota about all the “taking responsibility character-building” experiences. So save that justifcational psychobabble for internal process analysis, just make it work.
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Cider, what are you talking about?
I see Microsoft devs stepping up to take responsibility for bugs/problems all the time, since so many Microsoft devs have blogs.
I’ve *never* seen an Apple dev take responsibilty for anything at all, and no it’s not because Apple software is perfect, I’m a Mac user, so I know.
And I just use Apple as an example, since Apple is portrayed as “perfect”, but I rarely see any dev publicly taking personal responsibility for a bug. When I was a programmer, I certainly never did, nor did any of my coworkers. But I see Microsoft devs (the ones that have blogs) do it often.
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Cider, what are you talking about?
I see Microsoft devs stepping up to take responsibility for bugs/problems all the time, since so many Microsoft devs have blogs.
I’ve *never* seen an Apple dev take responsibilty for anything at all, and no it’s not because Apple software is perfect, I’m a Mac user, so I know.
And I just use Apple as an example, since Apple is portrayed as “perfect”, but I rarely see any dev publicly taking personal responsibility for a bug. When I was a programmer, I certainly never did, nor did any of my coworkers. But I see Microsoft devs (the ones that have blogs) do it often.
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