|
| Brainstorm at the Ritz indicative of industry's wider concerns Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, July 23, 2008 2:58 PM PDT Dozens of the most important people in a variety of high-tech fields are in Half Moon Bay this week, attending a conference that may have escaped your notice. “Brainstorm: tech” ends a three-day run at the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay, today. Chief executives, including Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Gregory Waldorf of eHarmony, joined an army of technocrats, journalists and trendsetters for a gathering hosted by Fortune magazine. Attendees have, of course, been discussing the fairly parochial concerns of tech kings, wrapped as usual in the eye-rolling nomenclature of the Internet. They are still concerned with “monetizing” the net, benefiting from “cloud” computing, lassoing digital “memes” and so on. But they are also clearly interested in more than that. The conference has included sessions on preventing disease pandemics, providing sustainable housing and promoting peace throughout the world. That sense, that big business is part of a wider world ecosystem, was clear in the run-up to the conference. Fortune senior editor David Kirkpatrick surveyed attendees before the event, asking, among other things, what the top priority should be for the next president of the United States and what their hopes were for the future. The answers were illuminating. John Chen, CEO of the Dublin-based Sybase, said his biggest hope was “that enhanced communication can strengthen trust at a global level.” Seth Goldstein, CEO of Palo Alto’s socialmedia.com, said he hoped the next president would increase “international empathy.” While these are ideas that might enhance business, they are rooted in a global concern that is sometimes dismissed by critics of the industry. The late, great U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos famously berated Yahoo executives for releasing data on dissidents to Chinese authorities. He called Yahoo’s CEO and the company’s counsel “moral pygmies.” While it’s true that these capitalists can sometimes suffer from the myopia common among other scions of commerce, that characterization ignores the forethought, the good works, the philanthropy on display at the Ritz this week. We are lucky, here on the western-most outpost of Silicon Valley, to have some true giants in our midst. — Clay Lambert |