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What Scares You, And Who Scared Them?
Let's see, there's the ever constant fear of being on the production end of a million-dollar blunder or data breach. And the upcoming elections have sure scared a lot of people one way or another, and the unease about high-tech voting machines isn't helping. And then there's the new Microsoft licensing terms, which have unnerved even more folks, almost as much as the dark shadow of Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and the ever-widening stock option scandal, which threatens to put a crimp in traditional high-tech compensation. Rounding things out, there's China, India, Vietnam, India, Russia, India...we could go on and on, but we'd rather have some fun. To take your mind off the trouble and toil, we present the scariest Halloween costumes we might have seen last night: At Bill Gates' house? It's a toss up between the cheery Google logo and EU commissioner Neelie Kroes carrying empty money bags. At Linus Torvald's? Bill Gates looking for treats. At Google? Windows Vista carrying a suitcase filled with Microsoft money. At Sony? One sparking, sputtering, and smoking battery after another, and another, and another. At Apple? A parade of lawyers, a handful of iPod competitors, and one SEC summons. At the home of HP CE0 Mark Hurd? A cluster of fear, including the specter of capital hill, subpoenas from several jurisdictions, and a P.I. waving a copy of Hurd's private cell phone records. At the home of Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik? Larry Ellison, spurning a treat and demanding to play a trick. At AOL? Online subscribers ringing the doorbell and then running away. MySpace posters of copyrighted material? A deleted URL. Road warriors? An airport security worker with an armload of confiscated high-tech gear, a tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of water and...an x-ray security machine. The music & film industries? Those damn downloading kids and the tools and sites that help them do it. IT professionals? An H-1B visa and a CEO without a clue. Office workers? A help desk phone ringing off the hook, and an ominous error message they've never seen before. Security professionals: This one was just too terrifying to mention. Courtesy of my colleague Johanna Ambrosio, here, too, are two of the most unlikely Halloween scenes: - The CEOs of RIM and NTP trick-or-treating together. What gets your vote for the scariest IT-related costume? And whose door would it haunt? You can give your peers a chuckle by posting your response below. « Making Space At MySpace | Main | Putting The Fun Back In Dysfunctional » |
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