So what?
The sixth annual All Things Digital (D6) annual gathering of the digital glitterati took place at the Four Seasons Resort in Carlsbad, California, from 27-29 May. The core of the conference was interviews conducted by the organizers, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.
Yesterday we commented briefly on the double act by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer because they actually said very little of substance. Unfortunately the same can be said for most of the speakers. The matter of the failed Microhoo merger, in particular, was raised far too often.
Yahoo
CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker were grilled relentlessly on Microhoo. “It’s like when you break up with your girlfriend,” said Yang. “Pretty quickly it’s he said/she said.” Being dumped by MS obviously hurt, but Yang said he thought Google was more attractive anyway, so there.
“We want you to start your day at Yahoo – home page, mail, search, mobile,” Yang continued. “We want people to come to Yahoo first thing in the day and multiple times per day.” This was the historical strength of Yahoo, and “we’re trying to pull focus back into those core areas.”
Dell
CEO Michael Dell took the opportunity to puff his company. Dell gained more consumer market share in Q1 than any company in the US. Hewlett-Packard sells more units worldwide, but Dell is growing faster and is ahead in revenues, he insisted.
Stores selling Dell PCs have gone from zero to 13,000 in a year. The company had added the “walk option” (going into a store) to the “talk option” and the “click option.” Wow. Vista is good, Dell said, but Dell is closely involved with MS in the development of Windows 7.
Amazon
“We are working on a new version of video on demand, a for pay streaming service we will release in the next couple of weeks,” said CEO Jeff Bezos. “The streaming service will start instantly and it’s a la carte, for pay.” This will be in addition to Amazon's download-to-Tivo service.
Other than that, Bezos mainly held forth on Kindle, his company’s e-reader. Books, he said, are like horses. You may love ‘em, but they smell funky. What is important is not the container, it’s the narrative. Kindle is making “long-form” reading more “frictionless.”
Time Warner
“AOL invented social networking.” declared CEO Jeff Bewkes. “We should be dominating it now,” he continued, in reply to a question about why he had paid $850 million the acquisition of Bebo, which the interviewer described as “a bunch of 12-year-old girls in England.”
Bewkes replied that Time Warner expects Bebo’s sound understanding of content and culture and great architecture to revitalise products like AIM and ICQ. How to compete with MySpace and Facebook? You just do it well, said Bewkes.