Etre 99: to be or not to be

Attending company presentations at Etre is just like playing roulette. Having decided which presentation you would like to see, you aim yourself at the appropriate room only to find that the speaker has cancelled/gone to another room/won't be speaking for half an hour.

My new strategy is to move rooms regularly and get what I get. This keeps you awake but usually in the dark as to what the hell presenters are trying to tell you. I find myself in a presentation by cSafe. Here's a company that prevents copying of digital images from a web site. Content owners are keen to make more images available but they don't want to risk the theft of these properties. If you try to copy or print a picture, the software simply replaces your image with a do not copy notice. I think this looks very useful and extremely easy to grasp. (www.csafe.com) S

alesforce.com - has a list of investors that reads like the who's who in the IT industry including Larry Elison and Pat McGovern. With an emphasis on ease of use (their tagline is 'Just sign on') and security, they deliver: accounts, contacts, opportunities, forecasts and reports. In essence, they run your whole sales process for you on their servers through a browser. This offering really got to me. The notion of ASPs had been rather flaky before, but now I could see a real solution and a huge benefit of outsourcing the whole problem. Their charging model is based on a per/user charge which will work out at about $50 a seat. Very cool - buy the stock when you can.

Dealtime.com is a worthy service that finds price points and suppliers for products and services. It's truly interactive, allowing users to ask who is selling product x at (or below) price y. Furthermore you can program the Dealtime desktop agent to seek out a price and alert you when product becomes available at that point. Sadly right now it only covers the US but the plan is to roll it out in Europe sometime in 2k.

Next, I found myself in a roundtable on building and maintaining web communities. Candice Carpenter from iVillage.com said it was hard to build them. Dan Rosenweig from ZD Net said that it was hard to define what a community actually was. His view was that the only useful communities were 'not large but small'. A guy called Clifton someone (sorry I couldn't track down his surname) made the best point - most advertising-based web communities were simply viewer-based while truer more long-lasting communities needed to be fully interactive. My own view is that feedback needs to be perceived by the author as being valued by the site owner. Whether it's seen as research data or business-critical information, people need to know that what they think can actually change something.

Gates delivered a typically visionary presentation. Curiously, he didn't really discuss how the vision would map against the industry, he simply talks about Microsoft products. I guess this is his prerogative. Two observations stuck out. Firstly MS has a new mission: 'Empower people through great software any time any place and on any device'. So they're no longer confined to the PC form factor. Second, Gates is keen to re-invent web authoring tools 'making them simpler'. I wonder if this will end up as another challenge to current IP standards? I suspect so. I guess this, too, is his prerogative.

As usual, the Q&A was more entertaining. Gates admitted that the technology industry forced players to re-invent themselves every two or three years in order to survive. However, he reckoned that 'there is no company as dedicated to the vision of the Web TV, the vision of the PDA and the vision of how you integrate this all together using internet services than Microsoft'.But,he went on, 'we could blow it.' I get the distinct impression that this is not his expectation. He cheered many potential competitors in the audience when he shared a little anecdote about Expedia.com, an online travel service that Microsoft has recently spun off.

When the guys who were running Expedia came to him and suggested that they should start pre-booking flights and hotels to make the service offer more substantial he declined. 'We would be straying away from pure software. Do I know anything about this? We could offend people and lose money at the same time.' Laughter and applause.

Alex bravely ventured into a discussion with Gates about his 'day job' as a philanthropist. I have always been rather cynical about Gates's giving spree as all his gestures seem to be rather public and rather in-your-face. I really don't mean to be disparaging but his generosity was never much in evidence when he released that version of Office that couldn't write files compatible with the previous version. Frankly, his speech didn't convince me that his generosity was unconnected with the DOJ and his personal popularity.

I quote from him directly: 'The vision that I have is that this is an era where the advances in medicine and technology are wonderful. When people get a chance to benefit from those things, it's a great thing. We shouldn't hold back just because we can't immediately give it to everyone. But I do think philanthropy has a role in accelerating how quickly that is widespread.' Hummm. Did Gates think he had mellowed up or mellowed down?

'There's this public image of intensity that's independent of the facts. This person is successful therefore he must be strained in some way or intense in some way...' Alex butts in with, 'Have you ever talked to Steve Jobs?' (pause) 'Steve is quite unique.' Huge laughter and applause. 'No, no, Steve is incredible.' 'But he's intense right?' 'Yeh Steve's intense.' More laughter and applause.

'So there's a new generation of entrepreneurs who have grown up on the internet. They have never met you they only know about you from the press. What advice would you give a 22 year old CEO of an Internet company?'

'I remember when I was 22 and Microsoft was three years old then. I wasn't in the practice of listening to guys who had been around for 25 years.' More laughter and applause.

'You are very famous. Can you have a normal life?'

'I try and do something normal every day.' More laughter and applause. 'I don't remember what it is.' More laughter and applause.

'No, there are pluses and minuses of being successful. I get to meet some incredible people, work on very interesting problems. There is also some loss of privacy that comes with that. It's kind of a problem. Certainly, I have a lot of time with my family. I have a three year old daughter and a four month old son and changing diapers and feeding a kid bottles, I think those are pretty normal things...'