Graphics cold war gets hot

THE TALK OF THE bar-crawling gutter set, aka us, at CeBIT is the near fight among the graphics vendors. No, I am not talking product launches that are aimed squarely at the eye of the other company, but real fisticuffs. Who would have thought the cold war would have hotted up, but given the temps at SnoBIT, it would be a welcome thing.

It goes something like this, at the Munchner Halle on Saturday night, there were the usual parties. Much alcohol was consumed, the bands were playing awful renditions of everything from Yellow Submarine to drunken songs that everyone in the place but me seemed to know. One of the more surreal moments of the previous evening was when the band leader dedicated a song to all the Swedish people in the audience, and asked them to stand up and get into it. Then he played La Bamba. Brain hurt, stabbing pain in the temple. It looked something like this.

Actually, it didn't look much like this, you could see the floor in this picture, and that was not the case for 99% of the night. There are also no trains of plowed morons spilling beer all over the patrons as they 'dance' around the edges of the place. Yup, it was a good time, and if you don't believe me about the alcohol consumed, look at this 'tower of Jag' at one of the SiS tables, it is a relatively small one all things said.

So, in this socially lubricated setting, the usual mixing of companies, and the usual bragging took place. Company A runs into Company B and talks trash. Company B goes over to Company A's party and insults the lineage of their products, maternal lineage and fabrication facilities. It happens all the time, and is all part of the game.

Most see this a fun, and play along. A few get a tad hot under the collar, and in extreme cases food, drink and other things tend to mysteriously arc from one table to the other. All in good fun. When one side fraternizes with the other to the point of exchanging phone numbers, those who take it way to seriously, well, go ballistic.

Around midnight, when things start calming down, a little, and groups start heading out, something unusual happened. When company A walked out of the building, a pack from company B followed. The trash talking went from indoor friendly to outdoor very unfriendly, and several people wanted to throw down. Quite unusual.

We are told that at least one side did not want to escalate, and tried to walk away, when a person from company B pressed the issue. There was a minor physical altercation involving a person from company B on two occasions, described by some as something between shoving and punching.

This is a stupid thing to do in Europe, very stupid. Unlike America where drunken brawling gets you lucrative TV contracts, Europeans see this as antisocial behavior. Most companies seem to frown upon their PR staff getting into fights with the other side in front of witnesses and journalists with cameras. Cameras that take movies.

Luckily, it ended there, with Company A's reps jumping into a taxi before serious blood was spilled, or at least drunks flailed semi-effectually at each other. The story is now all over CeBIT, and there is no official fallout that we know of. When people in power get back to their desks in a few hours, it will be interesting to see what becomes of this.µ