Yahoo! Tries to Upstage Glitch with Tom Cruise Appearance at Consumer Electronics Show

(LAS VEGAS) Yahoo's Terry Semel is giving his keynote at CES, unveiling a new service in partnership with telecoms AT&T, Singular, Nokia and Motorola, designed to offer consumers the ability to stay connected to their email, calendar, entertainment and the info of their friends as well, through a new service called Yahoo! Go, which promises to provide consumers with access through their PC, cell phone or TV.

Everything was going great until their demo computer locked up on stage during their Yahoo! Movies. So Semel walked up on stage and introduced Tom Cruise, who just walked on stage, said something meaningless about technology and introduced the trailer for the next Mission Impossible. If that's not a deux ex machina, I don't know what is.

Now, they're just showing a bunch of trailers, which does nothing to help me understand Yahoo! Go, how it works, and why it's important. I need to come to CES to see a movie trailer?

"If you're going to have a demo glitch, it pays to have Tom Cruise to follow it up," says Semel. But I disagree. To me, it looked more like an act of desperation. And I was planning to gush about the new service in this blog post, until this happened. I'd have been willing to overlook the glitch if they'd just have acknowledged it and moved on. By bring out Cruise to try and upstage the bug, it made it much worse in my opinbion. Sphere: Related Content