Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Transmeta was Not "Obnoxious"

Author:Karl Fast
Posted:1/21/2000; 9:26:48 AM
Topic:Transmeta was Not "Obnoxious"
Msg #:14681
Prev/Next:14680 / 14683

An article at MSNBC, linked to from Scripting News today, said that Transmeta was "obnoxious" in their secrecy and treatment of the press.

The Transmeta people were enthusiastic about all of their accomplishments, but were somewhat obnoxious when it came to questions from the press about all the secrecy over the past four years. They appeared to be very proud of the fact that they were able to manipulate reporters trying to gather facts for their readers by telling them lies to throw everyone off track.

But this begs the question, obnoxious to whom?

If you're a reporter who's livelihood depends on digging up facts and, quite often in the high stakes high tech world, rumour, then of course you'll view Transmeta's behaviour as obnoxious and arrogant. They thwarted your ability to hype their technology. You knew nothing about them and nobody would spill the beans. Aaaaghhh, you said. My readers want to know the truth, you shouted. The tech world doesn't work like this, you ranted. It drove you nuts. So when the day of pronouncement arrived, when Transmeta had finally deemed you, and the rest of the world, worthy of seeing their technology, you were hostile. To your credit you were a bit skeptical too, as you should be during announcements of such radically new technology--although you rarely are skeptical; too eager breathlessly announce to your readers that you have seen the future, it will arrive in 5 scant years and cost less than $500. Transmeta hadn't treated you, the press, with the proper respect. They made you wait 4.5 years before you could write a decent column about them. To you, Transmeta was obnoxious and arrogant.

But what about a consumer? What about me? Did I view their behaviour as arrogant? Not at all. It was refreshingly honest. Transmeta didn't breathlessly announce what they were going to do?, how they would revolutionize the world with a new microprocessor technology that should be ready in, oh, three to five years. Instead those "obnoxious" Transmeta folks announced a technology that is already in production, a technology that works today and will result in usable products appearing on the shelves later this summer.

On January 19th you needed to look no further than Slashdot to see how Transmeta has marched to a different and, for consumers, a more likable tune. After the Transmeta announcement they posted a story about a new Motorola battery technology that would increase life of the average laptop to about 20 hours. Sounds like heaven. Coupled with a Crusoe processor you could get as many as 40 hours from a single charge. Wow! But only when you clicked through to the Motorola battery story did you discover the fine print. It's just a laboratory discovery and it will take 3 to 5 years before it hits the market. IN other words, they would like it to start selling this in 3 years but 5 is more realistic and if you're a betting man, lay it down on 6 or 7.

FIVE YEARS! Step back five years and you'll see just how much time that is. At the start of 1995 Netscape had just been born and the world was it's oyster. Now it's just a cog in the AOL-Time-Warner media machine. Linux was still a toddler and only a few crazies truly believed, and even they had their doubts. Most developers still thought scripting wasn't real programming; Perl was a joke, a tool for lowly system administrators and tinkerers. Real programmers knew the web would be built on C/C++, although they backtracked on that later in the year when Sun introduced this new thing they called Java. And HTML? Microsoft was still laughing at it and telling people to jump on the Blackbird bandwagon--the real document format for the internet. And speaking of Microsoft, let's not forget that Windows 95 wouldn't hit shelves until the fall, and NT 4 not for another year beyond that. Five years is forever.

Now which is more obnoxious?

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