For instance, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos explained his latest project, a spaceship that he hopes will one day ferry consumers beyond even Amazon’s global reach.
“It’s like the Buck Rogers rocket,” he said, describing a ship that would take off from, and land on, its tail, like many a cartoon rocket.
 David Kirkpatrick, senior editor with Fortune Magazine, kicks off the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference at the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay Monday. |
The sixth incarnation of Fortune magazine’s “Brainstorm Tech” kicked off Monday with panel discussions that included electronic-book evangelist Bezos, computer maker Michael Dell and a host of other tech wizards. Previously, the conference had convened in Aspen, Colo., but this year organizers brought it to Half Moon Bay.
Fortune Senior Editor David Kirkpatrick began things by telling the gathering, “This is all about everyone interacting with each other — there really isn’t a hierarchy.” However, that democratic spirit applied only to the chosen few; the event was invitation-only. Security kept lookiloos at bay. The press was banished to a nearby room where a closed-circuit television connection carried the feed from the ballroom.
Many of those who were invited are business rivals, but an air of congeniality reigned. When presenters bemoaned the post-9/11 tightening of U.S. rules for international workers, it was as if the whole room nodded in agreement. There seemed to be a meeting of the minds, too, on the need for global cooperation, the beneficence of the Internet — even the supremacy of U.S. universities.
Is technology helping a world that sometimes seems to have slipped the tracks?
“Inarguably so,” answered Gary Hamel, a visiting professor at the London Business School and the man The Economist magazine calls “the world’s reigning business strategy guru.”
He said the global nature of the Internet was “emancipating human potential” and opined that unknown waves of creativity were lost to past generations because so many people across the globe lacked the resources to follow their dreams.
As if to underscore that point, Dell said that 500,000 people a day log on to the Internet for the very first time and that use of the World Wide Web would double in a couple of years.
Monday congregants also provided an amen any time a speaker mentioned the accelerating pace of innovation on the Internet.
Brad Smith has been the CEO of Mountain View-based Intuit for less than a year and he said he has been struck by how quickly things change.
“It feels like, at times, we’re a pretty good football team, but we’re standing in the middle of a baseball diamond,” he said.
Several industry executives said they are working to keep up with change by harnessing the power of customers. If the first iteration of the Internet was an effort to facilitate transactions, said salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff, and “Web 2.0” was all about creating connections between people, the next big thing will be creating platforms across which ordinary citizens can innovate.
“CEOs aren’t supermen,” Benioff said, making as if he were trying to tear off his business shirt to reveal tights and a block letter “S” underneath. “But we can listen to our customers.”
Put another way, Smith asked: “Are we paying our employees to do things our customers would volunteer to do?”
One of the last speakers today is a local. The 62-year-old Santa Cruz Mountains rancher plans to tell his mostly younger audience about “music, green cars and the future.” Rocker Neil Young is scheduled to speak this morning.
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