CEO Summit Speech Hints at Priorities

Microsoft’s fifth annual CEO summit gave Microsoft executives an opportunity to explain their view of information technology—and Microsoft’s role in it— to an influential audience. In past years, the topics of discussion have given some insight into the company’s agenda for the following year, providing important clues for resellers, partners, and competitors. For example, at the 2000 summit, Gates spoke about users storing relevant personal data in a centralized network location, then accessing it from a variety of computing devices—a vision that the company is now attempting to realize with its HailStorm Foundation Services. (See “HailStorm Fulfills Crucial Roles for .NET” on page 18 of the May 2001 Update.) This year, topics included intellectual property, the market for business-to-business (B2B) Web services, and broadband Internet access.

About 150 CEOs of Global 1000 companies attended the heavily guarded summit on May 23–24 and dined at Gates’s high-tech mansion. Guests included Meg Whitman of eBay, one of the first companies to announce support for HailStorm; Michael Capellas of long-time ally Compaq; and Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who may be an important Microsoft ally in the stiff competition against content giant AOL Time Warner. However, CEOs of some important Microsoft partners, including Hewlett Packard’s Carly Fiorina, Intel’s Craig Barrett, Dell’s Michael Dell, and IBM’s Lou Gerstner were reportedly absent. (Microsoft does not make an official list of attendees available.)