posted 18 February 2000 03:45 PM               

Despite attempts to jazz up Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' keynote with music, videos, and second-rate celebrities, the official Windows 2000 launch was painfully boring.

Attempts were made to break up Gatesâ hour-and-a-half long presentation with appearances by Patrick Stewart and skits featuring the actor who played J. Peterman on Seinfeld, but the weak jokes and low-power wit couldn't relieve the crushing tedium.

Wringing his hands like a Dickensian schoolmaster, Gates was his normal, humorless self. He followed the script and managed to sabotage the feeble jokes with an unerring lack of timing.

The endless show chiefly consisted of benchmarks casting the new operating system in a glowing light. Some of the more technical journalists in the audience afterwards claimed some of the benchmarks to be highly suspect. About an hour in, many of the reporters sitting in the front rows had run out of steam. Most had stopped writing, some were fidgeting with their watches and one had her head in her hands.

The highlight of the show was seeing the Microsoft cheerleaders miss their cues. Sitting in the wings in identical Microsoft shirts, the male and female employees were supposed to burst into wild applause at the end of every demonstration of a competition-crushing feature.

But occasionally they were clearly as nonplussed as the rest of the audience by the bulk of the demonstrations that mostly detailed the automation of some tedious business process. Often there were brief but discernable lags between the end of the presentation and the wild cheering. The lag did, however, provide some desperately needed comic relief.

A few precious seconds of fun also were provided by a halting executive from General Motors who was ushered on stage to chat with Bill.

The script called for the GM exec to be casual. But the bigwig was so comically wooden there was a faint anticipation that he would flub his lines. He didnât. The appearance of rocker Santana at the finale was the final insult. Here in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a giant music venue in the heart of San Francisco with historic ties to rock, the hippies, and the sixties, the squares had finally taken over.