Technical faults you don't want to happen
MICROSOFT suffered the technical fault from hell this week.
In a bid to show EU anti-trust regulators what a good Vole it was, it invited its rivals in the security business Symantec and McAfee to an online meeting to discuss how to make their products compatible with the new Vista operating system.
Everyone was sitting down and having a natter when 15 minutes into the meeting it all crashed and Symantec and McAfee were unable to reconnect.
McAfee told
Cnet that despite numerous attempts to reconnect, it was never able to get back into the meeting.
Symantec had better luck, one person was able to get back in, but the rest were shut out. A spokesVole admitted that there had been a few "technical difficulties" but these were resolved and the meeting resumed.
Sunbelt Software's president Alex Eckelberry said that the problems were no big deal. Writing in his
bog, he said that Vole had sent out the wrong meeting invites, and as a result, participants signed on as presenters. "Which, if you've ever used Live Meeting, is an invitation to chaos".
Sunbelt is a Volish partner which has penetrated deep into Microsoft culture. It makes Microsoft's anti-spyware engine. But in Eckelberry's version of the yarn, Microsoft rescheduled the meeting for half-an-hour later. However, that didn't go well either because the meeting had been set up to end an hour after its original start. It was all sorted out and the meeting went ahead.
It all seems likely, but it appears that Symantec and McAfee are using the incident to have another antitrust dig at Microsoft. More
here.