JohnnyL’s Blogic

I don't know about you, but no matter how many times I've spoken in front of large crowds, I still get nervous before walking on stage. I fear tripping while strolling away from the podium, or just tripping up on what I'm supposed to say. Haven't physically stumbled yet, but it's probably only a matter of time. If I wasn't going to be the problem, what was? There's an old adage in tech, if you're looking for something to go wrong, just include demos in your presentation. And I had a ton of great demos.

So there I was. March 27, 2007. "The biggest launch in Adobe's history", we kept saying. My first big launch here. I made it to the stage without tripping. OK, that's good. We had a few hundred in the local audience, and another 17,000 - 20,000 viewing live on our webcast. Everything was working the way it was supposed to - just like in all the rehearsals. A bad sign. That never happens. We had the appropriate oooohs and ahhhhhs in all the right places. The demos were flawless. We were even right on time (another rare ocassion in a launch event). Life was good.

And then, the grim reaper of stage events raised his ugly head. When I first glanced up to see a light static snow storm on the screen, I just assumed we had a little signal interference. But it continued. I glanced at the guy directing the show. He was sweating and yelping into his headset mic. Not good. The static got worse to the point where almost the entire screen was static. No demo. Just static. Really not good.

Although we were demoing with Internet Explorer, this wasn't the "blue screen of death" at work. In fact, it wasn't anybody's software. It was a fried video router. Hardware! After a bit of softshoe and stallling, we had no choice but to stop the show.

For those in the room, it was a simple 20-minute intermission, complete with free refreshments. But for the people viewing online, I was really disappointed. Good news was the webcast traffic didn't drop off as much as I expected, maybe 20%. Amazing when all the web audience could see for 20 minutes was event participants wandering aimlessly around while the AV folks were madly (and I do mean madly) trying to find and fix the problem. But they got it up and running. And the rest of the event went flawlessly - if a bit longer than anticipated.

I look at it this way. In 10 years Greg (my demo partner) and I will look back and remember the famous glitch in the CS3 New York City launch event. If we'd had no issues, we would have claimed it was just another great stage event...no hiccups, no snafus, no failed routers... And no story to tell.