Smartphone Thoughts: La Trattoria

Buried in the \Windows folder of every Smartphone 2002 device is this file called genevamap.gif.

A message was posted in the Smartphone newsgroup asking what this file was for and Neil Enns, a Lead Program Manager in the Mobile Devices Division at Microsoft, responded with a great story explaining where it came from and gave us permission to publish it here as well.

"Back in October of '99 Microsoft attended the Telecom 99 conference in Geneva. The show happens once every four years and is unlike any trade show I've ever seen. Apparently this year it will be smaller, but in 99 there were literally four-story exhibition booths with elevators, fountains, etc. This was spread through four different exhibition halls. Absolutely insane. (Our booth was a very modest two stories)

Anyway, in '99 BillG had a keynote address. It was the first time Microsoft talked about our efforts in the cellphone space, and is when the world first heard about "Stinger", what became Smartphone 2002. Naturally a BillG keynote requires a demo.

One thing to note about BillG demos is that you always have a backup. To borrow from my old choir teacher, if the building collapses the show must go on and your demo must work. Our demo included browsing to a website to locate a restaurant in Geneva for dinner from a live, working, Smartphone prototype (The phone was about as big as a cordless handset . The demo worked live, but we had a backup phone where all the necessary pages were burned into ROM just in case. The file below (as well as a couple of others) are remenants of that early demo. We found them before we shipped, but it was too late to pull them out since we are exceptionally risk averse in the end-game of a release.

The restaurant, by the way, was "La Trattoria". We didn't know anything about it when we built the demo. One night when I was walking around Geneva after the show, I actually found the restaurant. A colleague and I ate there for dinner, and the poor folks in the restaurant couldn't figure out why we were laughing so hard and taking piles of napkins with the restaurant name on them I still have one in my office somewhere..."