JavaOne

Well, perhaps sensing that her wording was a tactical error, she then told me that I was tasked with the job of subbing for him, but if I could find someone else to go in my place, then that would be fine. (Of course, I immediately turned to the fellow in the room and asked if he'd go, and my boss said, "Oh, no, he still has things to do this week."

So I figured I was just stuck with it.

Actually, it wasn't that bad. I just dislike having stuff like this sprung on me at the last minute. But oh well.

So this morning I drove up to SF to go to the convention. JavaOne is Sun's big Java convention. I don't know if this is the first one or what. I'm not a big Java weenie, so I don't keep track of this stuff. Apple has a presence there partly for WebObjects, which is getting a lot of press due to our recent price drop, and for the Macintosh Java runtime system. So that's basically what we were showing at our booth.

I was a bit surprised that despite being a few minutes late, I was the first of my shift to arrive. The booth was small: We had two G4s and 2 Cinema Displays (the 21" flat panels), one running Mac OS X Server, and one running Mac OS X Developer Preview 4. We also had stacks and stacks of CDs with an expiring trial version of WebObjects. And that was about it.

Well, I worked the booth from 10 til 2, and the other folks did eventually show up. And were we ever busy! There were maybe three or four lulls in the action the whole time, though I did slink out around noon to find drinks for all of us, since we were parched. (You'd think this would have been easy, that I'd find a vending machine in the Moscone convention center or something; nooooo! I had to go up to the street and walk to a convenience store! Gah!)

We got many, many, many inquiries about Mac OS X T-shirts, since apparently a few people at the convention were wearing some. (Maybe all of these people were Apple staffers. I don't know.) Unfortunately we didn't have any to give out. We also got questions about copies of OS X DP4 CDs, which we also didn't have. and we got many people who came by just to ogle OS X or the Cinema Displays. Yes, we have cool toys.

But we also got many questions about WebObjects, and gave away many CDs, maybe 200 of them. I described the product in a nutshell to many people, and answered some questions (to the extent that I could) about our future plans for the product. We got a few questions which would have been better directed to a marketing person or product manager, but overall I think it went pretty well.

There was also the opportunity to ogle what one of my cow-orkers calls Booth Babes. Okay, I think he mainly meant the women who companies apparently hire (or maybe employees who decide to clown around) to add 'color' (for lack of a better word) to a booth. Two booths down from us was a woman dressed like Carmen Miranda. And another company had about seven similar-looking women wearing tight black outfits and light blue shoulder-length wigs. Why? Who knows? It sure was surreal walking around the hall and suddenly seeing five women who look like they just stepped out of UFO in your path.

But I was more interested in the women staffing the booths on either side of us. I don't usually go for really (really) thin women like the one on one side of us, but boy, she had a smile that could knock you senseless... and I had a brief conversation with the woman on the other side, before we were each deluged with visitors again.

Also, a couple of reporters from ZDNet came by to ask us questions about the Microsoft trial results, which were announced today. Quoth they: "You're from Apple, you must have opinions about this! If not you, then...?"

The guy I was working with looked at me and said, "But I like my job!" Our official reply was that we had no comment, not feeling comfortable making statements while working at an Apple booth. They said that was cool and moved on. Gee.

Yes, it was pretty fun, all-in-all.

When I got back to work, I dropped e-mail with some comments to our product manager and sales manager, which seem to have been helpful.

So what do I think of Judge Jackson's ruling that Microsoft is to be broken up into two companies? In a nutshell, I think it would be a good start, if it actually comes to pass after the appeal process. It really needs to be broken up into five or six companies, though.

Heads up: Two comic books - or, rather, graphic novels - came out today which are worth noting if you're a fan:

1. Jim Steranko's S.H.I.E.L.D. stories from the late 1960s have been collected in paperback. This collection is somewhat controversial since apparently Marvel is not playing Steranko royalties that he feels he is due (and which he probably is), plus they spurned his offer to contribute better-quality originals and re-color the pages himself, which seems rather foolish to me. But, the book looks pretty spiffy and I look forward to reading it.

2. Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud, the follow-up to his terrific and successful paperback from a few years back called Understanding Comics. This one is thicker but is done in the same style and hopefully will be as good.