Though Esther, whose position in the center of high-tech has been unchallenged since the Reagan administration, chooses a theme each year, often the true conceit of the event emerges spontaneously. Two years ago, in the height of bubblemania there was the Guilt Forum, where the subject of the conferees’ Midas-like riches kept popping up. Last year, was the Bummer Forum, when suddenly there were fewer billionaires. This year, acknowledging the industry’s need to get back in the saddle, Esther proclaimed this the “Back to the Frontier” Forum, and nothing more striking really supplanted it. The feeling really was that it’s time to do the hard work and wizardlike inventing that worked in the early days of the personal computer and the Internet. “Things are even more upbeat than I expected,” Dyson said.
To be sure, there were still some bust-related shockwaves. Attendance at the conference was about 500, a drop from previous years. And one panel was going to include an executive from a telecom company called Yipes Communications, but his chair was empty–the firm had filed for bankruptcy just last Friday. Yikes.
But as always, the forum proved a valuable barometer of what the Tech Gods consider important at a given time. Here’s what was most passionately discussed: the continuing intellectual-property battles over music-sharing online; broadband Internet; broadband wireless Internet, and network security. No surprises, really.
It was also interesting to consider what wasn’t on the agenda. Even though some commentators have compared Enron’s shifty behavior to the false promises of the dot-com era, I don’t recall a single mention of the train wreck in Houston. Obviously the tech crowd does not recognize, let alone accept, the comparison. Oddly, no talk about the HP-Compaq merger, an ominous sign that the industry might consider it irrelevant. Also, although Microsoft’s president Rick Belluzzo, was interviewed on stage, there was only the barest allusions to what once was a prime topic among the digerati–the company’s ongoing antitrust problems.Though the court battle rages to this day, it felt like old news.
A few stars emerged from the three-day confab. The first was FCC Chairman Michael Powell. His “Market Uber Alles” talk during an on-stage interview by conference cohost Kevin Werbach on Sunday afternoon went over big—very big. A promise to unleash innovation is music that drives this crowd crazy. Earlier in the day, I’d interviewed Powell (son of the secretary of State) and discovered that he was a closet geek who was delighted that his own neighborhood was finally wired for high bandwidth. He has plans to immediately install a home wireless network. Yes, these were his people.
Speaking of wireless, the technology star of the show was wi-fi, the means of connecting wirelessly to the Net by use of a once-obscure band of radio spectrum. A company called Joltage provided this forum high-speed wireless access to the conference area itself, winning the infinite gratitude of the crowd. Each day more people came into the ballroom for the morning program, and immediately set up their laptops, thereafter splitting their focus between the panels onstage and their own e-mail and Web browsing. At one point, says Michael Chapio, Joltage’s CEO, his ad hoc wi-fi “hot spot” had 250 users online at once-half the total attendance at the conference! The speakers didn’t seem to mind; Kevin Werbach said, “It’s a lot better than having people sneak off to their rooms to read their e-mail.”
But we’re only beginning to grasp how weird it is to have wireless Net access all the time. One harbinger: during Tuesday morning’s session with Qwest telecommunications CEO Joe Nacchio, several conference participants were typing their impressions into personal “Web logs,” online diaries available to all on the Internet. One of these “bloggers,” Doc Searls, got an e-mail from a friend across the country, who noted that Nacchio—who at that moment was onstage complaining about how tough life was in telecom—had sold huge amounts of stocks over the past two years. He sent Searls a page from Yahoo Finance with the particulars and Searls linked it to his log. Then the friend sent the information to another blogger in the room, Dan Gillmor, who copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio’s whining. Though it’s not clear how many in the room were reading the Web logs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere.
One more star emerged from the conference. The after-dinner speaker Monday night was Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander of Europe. Now a private citizen hawking a book about his experiences, Clark gave a stirring speech about modern war, focusing on policy aspects, not the more geeky aspects of high-tech weaponry and its effect on the battlefield.
After his ovation, he was mobbed by adoring techies, venture capitalists and CEOs–who often talk of their business clashes with the jargon of war–hanging on every word from this flesh-and-blood warrior. Clearly, revitalizing the world of tech and sorting out markets in a digital age is not the only Good Fight around.
