PC Forum - Day 2

PC Forum day 2 was one of the best in all the 12 years I have been attending. It started out with Esther interviewing with Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO, Google. He wouldn't talk about the rumored IPO but he was very bullish about the potential for Google. Eric then joined in on a panel, "From Player to Platform: The Context Makes the Connection",along with Jon Miller, Chairman & CEO, America Online and Dan Rosensweig, Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo!.

Dan said that Yahoo!'s goal is to give people what they want, when they want, how they want it, on whatever device they want. Jon said that in the past few months AOL has begun to feel they may be gaining in their war on spam even though they are seeing more than 2.5 billion spam emails daily. Dan said that more than 90% of the spam to Yahoo! users is caught. That means that the incredible amount of spam that people see is less than ten percent of what actually gets sent.

There was a lot of discussion about social networks such as Orkut and LinkedIn. I don't think these are for everyone but they clearly are part of the emerging social software models. I finally threw in the towel and joined LinkedIn. (read more)

Conferences March 22, 2004 08:13 PM

PC Forum - Day 1

PC Forum is one of the conferences I most enjoy because it always try to look at the big picture. Esther Dyson opened the conference by announcing that her company, Edventure Holdings, has been acquired by CNET (see full press release for details). The agenda this year is focused on looking at the world and the US political scene through the lens of IT. The opening day of the conference was about "Globalization".

The first panel was about worldwide economic development, free trade, and the impact of "off-shoring". Narayana Murthy, Chairman, Infosys Technologies (and one of the many good speakers/panelists at the conference) made a really good point that the various geographies of the world will ultimately see value in "coming together" and will begin to break down barriers. His proof point was how the European Union came together for that very reason. Louis Rosenthal, Executive VP, ABN AMRO Services Company was skeptical about this point and believs that in some cases the barriers have actually increased. He also expressed a view that much of the debate about "off-shoring" is political noise that will go away after the U.S. elections. The others on the panel viewed the issues as more fundamental. Off-shoring is missing the bigger point which is that the world is globalizing. Diana Farrell, Director, McKinsey Global Institute said "competition is at the heart of productivity". The bottom line was a view that globalization means new markets and new jobs as long as countries don't over-regulate. (read more)

Conferences March 22, 2004 01:43 AM