Some background: many years ago Adobe launched Acrobat 6 and shortly after, the Creative Suite. At the time I was working for a systems integrator and some clever colleagues had developed an application designed to enable the concurrent collaboration of a PDF document by multiple users. The idea was you could open a pdf and use Acrobat’s built in commenting tools to review the document, it was possible for several people to simultaneously review the same document and see each other’s comments. We thought we were very clever and since we were launching a special training deal for the Creative Suite at Coventry University, we decided to show it (not fully developed) to a wider audience.
Much preparation ensued and by the time we gathered in a large auditorium, we were ready to go. The morning session was to last about four hours and started with a demonstration of the Creative Suite by an Adobe guy called Chris, who just happened to be the UK’s leading expert. Now Chris was and is a very talented and engaging speaker, he also knew the products inside out and was actually last seen heading off to San Jose to head up the product in the USA. The audience sat there mesmerised as Chris ran through clever things with Photoshop, funky things with InDesign and truly amazing things with Illustrator. During this he also made the wonderful comment “I was at a demonstration last week and the poor guys laptop broke, all he could do was say to the audience, try to imagine this”.
A coffee break later and I took the stage and started running through the ins and outs of Adobe Acrobat, which even then did far more than most people realised. Then came the pièce de résistance having shown the audience how you could mark up a pdf document with post-it notes, highlight text, use drawing tools etc. I then said “now wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could do all this and at the same time other people could be doing it and you could see what they were writing and vice versa”.
As you have probably guessed that’s the exact point where my PC decided that if I insisted on connecting it up to a projector so 150 people could watch it do tricks, the best trick of all is the “blue screen of death”. This left me with the opportunity to say the immortal words “now I’d like you to try and imagine this”.
What can we learn from this? well when you are faced with disaster during a demo, don’t panic, other people have survived similar problems, a sense of humour helps and if something can go wrong, sooner or later it will.
Now a last thought – if I had been using YuuGuu and performing this demonstration over the web, from my office, would my computer still have died? The obvious answer is yes, but I could grabbed a colleagues PC and carried on, almost as if nothing had happened, all whilst not leaving the comfort of Richmond.
