Due to the prohibitive cost of phone line use while on the road, we're not exactly the most plugged-in people in the world right now. However, based on what we've been able to see, it doesn't appear that very much was made of the "oops" factor during Steve Jobs' keynote last Wednesday. In case you didn't hear, Steve and Phil Schiller (Apple's head marketing dude) were trying to illustrate the incredibly fast networking performance of Mac OS 8.5, aka Allegro. They had two screens set up-- one showed a Mac running a beta of Allegro and connected to an Appleshare IP server, and the other showed a Pentium II running Windows NT and connected to an NT server. The idea was that Steve and Phil would each start copying the same >100 MB file from each client machine back to their respective servers, thus illustrating that Allegro's networking performance was much faster than NT's.

Unfortunately, things didn't quite go as planned; after the Mac took a quick lead, its file copy got "stuck" and the progress bar just sat there like a NYC doorman when approached by a hotel guest carrying a skateboard. (Must not think there's any tip in the prospect.) Needless to say, the NT system finished first, and in fact it took a little while for Steve and Phil to figure out how to kill the stuck copy process. Soon enough, though, they were able to try the demo again, and that time, the Mac finished quite ahead of the NT system. So the lesson of the demo was that Allegro's networking has two speeds: really, really fast, and standing still. (Presumably, Apple plans to remove the "Standing Still" speed from the OS before it actually ships.)

Now, we report this simply to be fair; the whole world heard about Bill Gates' Windows 98 crash at Comdex a few months ago, but it seems like the Allegro flub went relatively unnoticed. By gum, we want the world to know that Apple is just as capable of screwing up a beta-stage product demo as the next company! Okay, okay-- Apple's OS didn't actually crash when the demo went awry, and it performed as intended on the very next try without so much as a restart, but cut them some slack; Microsoft's got lots more experience building unstable software than Apple does.