D conference, 6th edition of digital Pandora's box!

All things Digital is the yearly conference of the tech world, hosted by Wall Street Journal and has been going on since 2003. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher shoot questions mercilessly at the opponent, be it the richest man on earth, Bill Gates, or his most innovative counterpart Steve Jobs.
The D6 or the 6th edition, was held from 26th to 29th of May and was eagerly watched over by the Geeks. It was really a Pandora’s box which opened Microsoft's ideas for Windows 7, Yahoo's own Jerry Yang's confessions, Facebook's Toddler CEO Mark Zuckerberg's amateurish answers. You have all that. It a complete, 3 day long soap for techies.
Last 3 days I was doing no work in office, but following the whole D thing. And thanks to the D6 website, I could get nice video highlights, and transcripts of the happenings. I wish I were in California rather than in some remote town in India, so that I could also get to see these things live.

Nevertheless, the 6th edition was pretty interesting to watch, it kept up with its tradition. Remember the Bill Gates- Steve Jobs sharing the podium in last year’s version? That is the best thing about the D. There are no cuts, no second takes, no cover ups. The sharp tongues of Kara and Walt battle with the big corporate legends, and even audience get their chance. It foams out so much information.

I will brief some of the highlights of this year, before I write separate blogs for those which I feel are very much interesting and useful.

First and foremost, as always the Microsoft, wherever they go they pull crowd. This time it was Bill Gates along with his long term partner and CEO Steve Ballmer, and discussed about the Yahoo! deal, the Vista debacle, and more interestingly the first sneak peaks on Windows 7.

Then you had Jerry Yang along with Yahoo! President Sue Decker almost struggling to put up a smiling face and say Yahoo! is not dead! Yahoo! is rising.

Also, the sandal CEO, Mark Zuckerberg at last shed his habit of wearing sandals for public meets! No that is not the big news, he along with Sheryl Sandberg opened up about what is actually Facebook, “Share, share, share, share…” he kept on saying this so many times. It was clear, though he is too good a techie, not yet trained completely for the public speech. And between share, he also said, Facebook is not interested in Microsoft deal or an IPO right now.

We had Melinda Gates talking about pulling Bill out of Microsoft for more efforts on philanthropy, and their plans on how to make the world a better place.

Apart from that there were many others like Rupert Murdoch talking about news in general and news.com in particular. Amazon.com’s own Jeff Bezos and much many. But I will end this blog with some interesting quotes.

“No product we have shipped including Windows 95 has given 100% of what i wanted in that product…” Bill Gates, when asked whether Vista was able to achieve what it expected to.

"I do think I'm the best person to run Yahoo. Not only because I bleed purple, and bleed Yahoo..." Jerry Yang, when attacked asking whether he should actually remain Yahoo's head.

"Eric (Schmidth) and Larry (Page) came over to my apartment, but I didn't have enough furniture, so Eric sat on the floor.." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when asked about his relationship with Google.

"we have a culture that is very much about "we need to do better". Vista has given us more opportunities to exercise the culture than some other products we have shipped." Bill Gates, again on the Vista failure.

"Kara:Do you use MySpace? Murdoch: No. Kara: Facebook? Murdoch shakes head: No", media veteran, and news Corp. head Rupert Murdoch.

That will all in this coverage I suppose, I will come back again with the individual events, which I found interesting, till then here is link for you to feed upon.
All things Digital website.

Also check out my tech blog with a sense of sattire and humor, sillytech.
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