More than 100 of the world's top CEOs are in town this week for Microsoft's 13th annual CEO Summit, though you'd hardly know it given the tight controls over the flow of information. The event has always been a private affair, starting with a reception at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle on Tuesday night. (We checked it out, but couldn't get access to the core activities.)
In past years, Microsoft allowed reporters to watch a simulcast of the keynote speech on the Redmond campus. But this year, that was dropped in order to "respect the privacy" of attendees, said a company spokeswoman. Instead, Microsoft has released four short video vignettes (all of which are a minute or less) from the keynotes of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.
Of course, it's hard to get a real feel of the event through four minutes of video. And it certainly would have been fascinating to hear what Ballmer and Gates had to say to folks like News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett given where the economy stands today. But we are reduced to sound bites, including this 56 second clip of Ballmer discussing cloud computing and the following 39 second clip about venture capital.
"The cloud. The Internet. Some people probably think the Internet revolution is second half of the game. But I tell ya, we are coming into halftime... I don't even know how much the buzzword is buzzing, but the degree of change that'll continue to come as essentially businesses and IT departments embrace the Internet, it is unbelievable.
And here's Ballmer on the venture capital market, noting that the "7th, 8th and 9th copy of the idea probably won't get funded today."
"There's plenty of venture capital out there in my opinion relative to ideas," he said.
Meanwhile, Gates addressed the economy, saying he's "optimistic" given the "opportunities for innovation."
And he offered some insights on how changes in the global economy can effect the poor.
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