Oracle and Intel share Fernando's Worst of Show award

IF WE HAD to name the worst of the show at this years' Expo Comm 2007 down under, we'd begin with Oracle, followed by Chipzilla.

Oracle surely has a good product in its "E-Business suite" but apparently few people are attracted to a big booth full of brochures of complex enterprise/ERP software products. Thus, the booth promoting Oracle's EBS remained empty most of the time, with the representatives talking among themselves or looking at passers by with a mix of loneliness and desperation. I repeated my visits on different times and on two different days, with the same results.

Second in my list of companies which didn't score is Intel, you know, Chipzilla. Its booth was so bizarre that it defied any explanation. A dotted line separated reality from "the future" and once you stepped across the " welcome to the future" line, you saw one desktop and one notebook PC sporting multi-core CPUs and playing a video, or a video game.

On a chair sat fliers about Chipzilla's multi-core heaven and there was this poor chap in a white outfit resembling a mix of painter and mad man, who introduced himself as "I'm the man of the future, and you can be one too!". Visitors were invited to pose for a picture next to this *cough* "man from the future". You were then handed leaflets and sent on your way. It was the most bizarre experience I've seen. If that's the future, let's go back to the past.

Lat year, local tech site Infonews made it its trademark to have a mini-golf hole in its booth. And that was OK. But this year another pair of booths also decided to show or portray golf, including a new booth from the "CIO's Links" magazine where CIOs smiled from the covers while a golf bag full of clubs sat below waiting to be given away as some sort of grand prize. Then was Nextel with a"virtual golf" game. I just don't get it.

Yes, some people played those. But all this does is reinforce the notion of an elitist show that targets the cream of the crop, not the average Joe. At least down here, golf is far from a popular sport. I'm willing to bet that even rugby is more popular nowadays.

By comparison, Ertach's - WiMAX ISP - booth and its Nintendo Wii featuring a tennis game proved a hit. But hey, surely those that decided to feature those golf games think everyone enjoys golf.

Finally, we end this list with CNC, the National Communications Commission, or the local Ofcom wannabe, which had a polished booth on this years' exhibition. Two girls and a desk chock-full of leaflets about consumer rights and toll-free numbers to call, and empty promises like the having "a new look towards society".

Clearly they do not consider themselves part of society, and we should bow at their presence and thank them for the fact that they let us call them to complain. No words about when they'll mandate the much-needed Local Loop Unbundling as Telefonica had to face in Spain.

And this, my fellow readers, ends the worst of the show. Thank the heavens everything wasn't that bad, and there were a few good surprises. µ