The Curse of the Technology Demo

Posted by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on May 3, 2007 in Business, Developing, Fun, Innovation, Personal | 2 comments

Yesterday, during the Wakoopa Launch Party, a friendly young entrepreneur pitched me his online application. He opened his MacBook Pro, launched his browser and clicked on something.

Then, nothing.

“Hey, that is weird, it is supposed to…
Ehm…
Give me a few seconds…”

Oh yeah, the Curse of the Technology Demo. If there is one thing you can count on (when it comes to technology) its on your application crashing the moment you demo it. It made me remember an old story.

In 1999 we turned to a young software developers company with a complicated project. We wanted a Redirect Service that could handle millions of redirects per day with local redirect servers in different countries. We were going to spend a lot of money on it too because we wanted to build a stable and reliable service. The developers started working and after 6 weeks we were invited for a technology demo. On 2 large conference tables they had placed a bunch of PCs all connected to each other through miles and miles of cable. There was a main server which was ‘smart’ and we had client servers which were ‘dumb’ and only redirected. The Main server synced the database to the client servers every 10 seconds.

The idea behind this set-up was that we could easily add client servers to scale and that if one client failed its work would be taken over by another client. Clear and simple. Even I understood it.

So then it was time for a demo. The main developer stepped up and explained that the whole thing would keep working no matter what happened. He walked up to one of the client server, grabbed its power cable and announced:

“I will now disconnect this client and the system as a whole will keep working…”

And then he pulled the plug. In the same milisecond a blue screen of death popped up on every screen in the room and then the room went very quiet. The only thing we heard was the spinning down sound of the fans in every computer in the room as the developers held their breath waiting for some serious, well, constructive criticism…

Then we (the client, not the developers) started laughing and suggested they give it another try. It turned out that an untested switch was causing the problem and it all worked flawlessly after that.

We had been aware of Curse of the Technology Demo and therefore weren’t to surprised that it didn’t work.

Luckily for them…