Origami Demo: Oops!

This item (via 37 Signals) reads like a story from a Korean edition of The Onion, but it seems to be legit: At the Seoul unveiling of Samsung's Q1, an undersized portable PC based on Microsoft's "Origami" platform, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The Samsung executive couldn't figure out how to navigate his slides. The battery died a few minutes into the presentation. A Microsoft exec took over and also had trouble figuring out how to use the thing. So did a gent from Microsoft. There must have been prodigious quantities of flop sweat shed on that stage.

I don't know the root of the problems here, but the Q1 is a keyboardless device that you navigate with a pen, like a Tablet PC. And part of me thinks that any Windows-based device that expects you to do without a real, physical QWERTY keyboard is a little like a car with no steering wheel. (I'm aware that there are folks who own and love slate-style Tablet PCs, but they remain a decidedly small percentage of the computer-toting populace.) So it's possible that that some of those demo woes did indeed reveal flaws in the product. But it's also possible that the demo gods simply chose to make trouble. (They even taunt Steve Jobs from time to time, although he's remarkably good at blithely ignoring things that go wrong when he's showing off a new product.)

Anyhow, it's easy to chuckle at demos gone bad--in fact, it's practically a tradition with Bill Gates keynotes. But as someone who's struggled with presentations myself from time to time, I shuddered a bit in sympathy for the Origami guys.

In my years in the technology journalism biz, by the way, I've sat through...well, let's see, it must easily be in excess of a couple of thousand product demos. I've seen executives who didn't seem to know the first thing about their own products. I've seen spectacular Blue Screens of Death. I've seen products that were supposed to easy prove to be hard, and ones that claimed to be fast turn out to be incredibly slow. I once saw several bigwigs from a major computer company huddled around one of its Media Center PCs, failing to get it to work. (It turned out that Norton Anti-Virus had popped up an error message which couldn't be seen via the Media Center interface--a glitch which made wonderfully clear why Windows PCs still struggle to find a home in the living room.)

And once, during a demo of a new mouse, I saw it spontaneously catch on fire. (That remains the most memorable botched presentation I've ever seen...)