Poetic Pseudo-Justice

I have to share this story from one of my lectures from last week.
The class is TechVentures and the topic is "The Connected Home".
We have a guest speaker, a Kellogg alumn who's a product manager at Microsoft.

Microsoft is a major player in what will probably be the next generation of home entertainment. They are trying to get in on the ground floor to make sure that all the "multimedia appliances" you use in your house will run on Microsoft software.

Anyway, the guy is in Redmond, Washington. We are in Evanston. We need a teleconference. The first couple of options (i.e. video phones and teleconferencing equipment) didn't work out due to equipment difficulties.

So, we went to the next best thing, online chat!
Seeing as how this guy is from Microsoft, we tried to set up a video chat using MSN Messenger. It just flat out didn't work! The guy said that he had some problems with the Microsoft firewall (I didn't buy it). We then went to my old favorite, Skype. Guess what, Skype worked great! No firewall issues. Hmmm... I wonder why Skype didn't have any issuess??....

We had a 1.5 hour conference using a webcam set up on a tripod to try to get as many of the students as possible. The sound was flawless. The picture was not real time, but nothing is at this point.

I sat through the class with a wide smirk on my face because the MSN software failed at one of it's primary tasks and software developed by an independant firm worked great.

How sweet it is. I really should get some help.