I have been on a strict diet when it comes to attending conferences this year — I must hunker down and write! I allowed myself one exception this season, so here I am at Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s third “D” conference, the Wall Street Journal’s technology-and-media extravaganza.
Last year’s event kicked off with Bill Gates tantalizing us with the wonders that were to be Longhorn, and how the new version of Windows would transcend the whole notion of “search.” Google? We won’t need no stinking Google, Gates all but declared: “Longhorn’s about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup… Longhorn brings the notion of an object-oriented database to the way information is stored…”
Well, in the intervening year those exciting features of Longhorn’s much-touted new file system seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, as Microsoft labors mightily to move this massive project forward so that it might conceivably see the light of day before 2006 winds down.
This year, then, while I’ll pay close attention to what Gates — and every other technology executive here (tonight’s event kicks off with Steve Jobs) — has to say, I’ll also remember that it’s much easier to talk about great technology than to make it work and get it into people’s hands.
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