Last week when I read Jamie’s excoriation of the Blackberry Playbook dev platform (so many people forwarded it to me), it made me sad.  Sad because a developer was hitting friction on a platform on which he clearly wanted to develop apps.

Tyler Lessard from RIM responded to this open air criticism, and I give him points for his embracing this publicly.  I look forwarded to meeting Tyler at some point in the future.

There are some in the community that said Jamie was bitching and moaning.  He was.  They say he gave up too easily.  Perhaps.  This issue does elucidate a more pressing issue, which is the plethora of choices available to the discerning developer, and the decreasing ability to get it wrong if you are a platform provider.  Further, with Twitter and blogs being so public – they are forever etched in stone people! (i.e. the search index) – it’s hard for a platform provider to not to feel like they are under constant and heavy fire.

Yet, the very tools which quickly bring scorn and ire to some can provide for a happy ending to others.  In just under 4 hours, I was able to reach out to someone in another country, whom I have never met, and had never heard of prior to last week, and prompt him to action.

Even if we build the platform one developer at a time, that’s one more developer than we had last week.  Every developer matters.  Every. Single. One.  I effing love my job.

What do you do when you have a large tradeshow presence to plan? Clearly you want to put your best foot forward.  If you are going to attend the Mobile World Congress, we’re talking about your absolute best foot forward.  Booth space isn’t cheap, and you have 50K people to impress.  Sadly, I feel that one company had a bit of a “lost in translation” moment when they planned their presence.

I am not sure, even now, I can tell you what CBoss does.  To the left is a logo grab from their website.  I think they have something to do with IT infrastructure, but I can’t be sure.  If, based on their show presence, I was asked to tell you what they did, I would say that they have invented a machine which manufactures women in vaguely futuristic or revealing clothing.  Though, I am not sure if they do it in hardware or software, so I’m not sure how excited I should be.

To make this point, allow me to share this photo.  You see, this booth was just across from the Microsoft booth, and it was quite loud.  At any given moment, there was anywhere from 3 to 7 women on stage.  Yes, stage.  It wasn’t clear if there was any meeting areas.  I did not see a single male working at the booth the whole time I was there.  In fact, the cynical person in me thinks that the company is completely fabricated, and the booth presence was constructed by Google in an effort to deflect attention from Windows Phone 7.  It seemed that every time our team was getting ready to do demos, CBoss cranked up the music.

Scantily clad women is bad.  Tacky.  Worse still is not even having an employee who has even a bare modicum of understanding of the subject matter presenting on stage.  Each time a presentation occurred, it was someone reading, badly and quietly, from a script.

Here’s where it get’s interesting.  The astute reader will note text on the backdrop of the stage.  I must admit, I was at Mobile World Congress for 3 whole days before I even noticed the text.  3 days.  The distraction factor was quite high.

What on Earth is that?  “CBoss presents the 55th product”?  Huh?  And how exactly do you use “network functionalities more efficient”?

My personal favorite: “Your Benefits in Post-Crisis Markets.”

If you are going to spend the money on a booth, and certainly the, erm, people talent to bring people to the booth, make sure people can understand what you do, especially if they are staring at your booth.