PC unreliability rears its ugly head again

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/dgillmor/dg020602.htm">http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/opinion/dgillmor/dg020602.htm</a><br /><br />From the "It seemed like a good idea at the time" department, this column by Dan Gillmor points to the ugly crossroads where reality and technology meet. Looks like a fender-bender to me! I promise the next posting will be some form of good news. ;-)<br /><br />"The young woman at the technical support desk worked for Compaq, according to the name tag on her green shirt. She did not appear to be having a great day. <br /><br />In a gesture designed to win friends for its iPaq handheld computers, Compaq had handed out the devices, equipped with connections to a wireless network inside the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, to several thousand corporate chief executives, high-ranking government officials and others attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. One problem: The system was broken, and its would-be users were not pleased.<br /><br />Oh, it worked some of the time. But far too often, attendees -- who'd waited in long lines to get the iPaqs in the first place -- couldn't make the devices handle the promised functions, such as sending and receiving e-mail and signing up for panels. I had to reset mine repeatedly when it stopped responding. Like many others, I headed back to the support desk to ask the beleaguered tech staff for help.<br /><br />No one pointed fingers, at least not officially. Compaq may have been least blameworthy. The key software was from Microsoft, whose Pocket PC operating system powers the iPaq, and Hayward-based AvantGo, which supplied a program to synchronize the devices with the central server computers. The Accenture consulting firm was the ``systems integrator,'' responsible for putting it all together."

[willh]

When I read about the WEF using a wireless LAN with iPaqs for session info and even video of sessions - I thought "What am I missing?"

From my own experience, I can get many of these things to work (remote syncing, fluid video, etc) ... but not without a lot of trial and error. If it were not a hobby of mine ~ there would be no way I would work on these things as much or as hard as I do... in other words - I wouldn't expect the average user to go through what I do to make some of the advanced (and not so advanced) aspects of the PocketPC work.

I read that Accenture provided the back end integration - and thought - "Well - they must have it all together so that this system will go off like clockwork." Not so. It's depressing so find out that implementing these systems with functions that "should" work - in fact, didn't work.

[Tari Akpodiete]

or maybe, they should just have had Chris De Herrera set it up for them...

[fmcpherson]

I believe that Compaq provided iPAQs at last year's Davos so this wasn't something entirely new. This article was Gillmor's usual hit and run against Microsoft, and provided little detail. What exactly where people trying to do?

The very first thing I would suspect, given the limited amount of information, is the wireless network.

On the other hand, I have had a 3870 for a couple of weeks and there is something definitely not right about it, and I am suspecting the SD/MMC driver.

[Mr. PPC]

I can see two possible reasons that it didn't work, not talking hardware. The hardware wasn't the problem, poor management was.

Either it never worked or was flakey. If that was the case it should never have been rolled-out.

or...

It worked, but do to STUPID USERS (applying the generic term) there were problems and Compaq didn't staff the support desk correctly. One support person alone is not even close to what I would have recommended, especially considering who the users were.

There will always be problems, part of managing is looking at risks and making plans to deal with them. Clearly this wasn't done!