Notes from Mix ‘07
May 12th, 2007 by EyeOnWiner
A reader who shall not be identified sends this report from Mix07…
I met Dave last week in Vegas at Mix07, and he acted like a troll every minute of
the three hours (felt much longer 
that I spent in the same room with him. The
moment I admired most was after the Ray Ozzie keynote about Silverlight, when
Scoble wanted to interview Winer and a few other guys him live on ustream.tv
about Silverlight, and Dave had no clue what to say about it, so he started talking
about RSS and the competition betwen MovableType and Userland instead. Only
after quite a while of irrelevant talk, Scoble intervened: “Let’s get back to Silverlight”,
and Dave replied snottily: “Hey, Scoble, this is not your show, we can talk about
anything we want.” That was one of the stupidest thing I ever heard, because it
clearly was Scoble’s show, plus we were at the Mix07, five minutes after the
accouncement of Silverlight, so that would have been the natural thing to comment on.
But everything is Dave’s show, right?
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May 12th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I can’t help but think this is more Scoble’s fault. I think his blind hero worship makes him unable to see that Dave really doesn’t have that much of a grasp on new technology.
Putting aside the funny stories (remember the iPod) one of the things that always annoyed me about Dave’s “River of News†RSS reader was that it was a project that any competent .net or Java programmer could do in under an hour. But Dave uses C (not “++†or “#†btw) and his painfully old Frontier engine so it took him months.
Now you have to ask yourself, how is this guy with no next-gen platform experience, no .net experience, and possibly no object-oriented programming experience whatsoever going to make heads or tails out of Silverlight.
He’s not, and the truth is he probably walked out of that presentation without the first idea of what the advantages of Silverlight really were. So now you have Dave Winer, a man too attention hungry to turn down camera time and too arrogant to just sit quietly being put into a situation where he’s supposed to discuss something he probably doesn’t really understand. His only option would be to try to pull the conversation to something he does understand. When Scoble tried to pull it back Winer, like all of us when we’re scared of something, got edgy and snapped at him.
Certainly doesn’t excuse the behavior but I personally would give Dave a pass on this one.
May 13th, 2007 at 3:42 am
No, let’s not. He does not get a pass for refusing to learn new things. He does not get a pass when his arrogance is what got him into this situation.
There’s a reason that people at conferences will move, as a herd, across the street just to avoid him. He’s nuts and people need to stop including him in things that he clearly has no interest in.
May 15th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Scoble was Winer’s employee at Userland and survived that experience to be considered one of Winer’s friends.
This anecdote illustrates the role you must accept to be one of Winer’s friends. He maintains the right to treat you as a servant for that privilege. Scoble is the apex of affability. Winer the king of condescension. They fit well in those roles. All the shit flows downhill.
If you continue to accept those terms (as Scoble has with a few minor complaints) then you might stay on that short list of special people who can tolerate Dave’s special gifts.
The list of people who got close and moved away or were pushed away is much longer than the list of friends (Cadenhead, Kosso and Curry come to mind).