Oracle may have just announced a new fully-automated database, but there’s one area where the company is still dependent on humans: Larry Ellison’s presentation clicker.
When the executive chairman took the stage Sunday night for the opening keynote of Oracle OpenWorld, he found himself struggling to keep his presentation slideshow aligned with where he was in his talk.
That’s when Ellison told the audience his showbiz secret: Despite appearances, the presentation clicker doesn’t actually control which slides are shown to the audience. It’s just a way of communicating with the theater technician to get them to manually change the slides.
“All my button does is notify a human being. It’s really not automation at all. It’s fake automation. If it was real automation, that would not have happened,” Ellison said.
To solve the problem, Ellison put down his clicker, and said “next slide” out loud whenever he needed the presentation changed.
The trouble, however, didn’t end there. Toward the end of his presentation, Ellison said that one of his slides had been deleted, and later that they were out of order.
“Someone rearranged my slides. It’s okay,” Ellison said.
