PC Forum is off to a great start this year with an interview with Eric Schmidt from Google and a panel with the CEOs of AOL, Yahoo, and Google. I do not plan on taking detailed notes so I suggest you view Ross Mayfield’s blog and posts to stay current on the conference. I also suggest visiting David Weinberger and Brett Fausett for more notes.
With respect to the first panel, I took some interesting notes on spam. AOL and Yahoo are doing all that they can to stop spam, catching high 90% of it. The frightening aspect is that the high amount of spam that you do see is only the 4-5% that is not filtered. AOL gets 2.7 – 3 billion spam messages per day which is trying to get into their system. Not a surprise that spam is a huge issue, but these numbers are. No one claimed to have a silver bullet, but rather advocated the use of multiple ways to overcome this issue.
Bruce Schneier had some interesting comments on the security and risk panel. Specifically, Bruce said that security is social and not about technology. Yes, there are technical causes and solutions for security but it is irrelevant if the social and economic model are not fixed. For example, there are plenty of spam filters out there but we still get tons of spam. The economics work for spammers. For users, it comes down to balancing security with the cost to mitigate the risk. People will make decisions based on economic value and cost. I totally agree here.
Next up was the CIO panel (Dawn Lepore, former CIO of Schwab, Shai Agassi, SAP, and Rafael Sanchez, Burger King). Dawn Lepore said that software is one of the biggest issues for CIOs. It is complex and costs are excalating tremendously. Software vendors and customers are diametrically opposed as the software vendors want to lock-in customers and the customers want flexibility. How does seeing an architecture diagram where the vendor’s products are in 12 places in a stack solve her business problem? Given this tension between vendors and proprietary lock-in, it is no surprise that open-source and open-platform technology and new business models like the hosted or subscription sale are spreading rapidly. The more you hear the panel talk about technology and the job of the CIO as being a risk manager, you can clearly see why it is so hard for an early stage company to land a big customer. Who wants to take the risk of buying a new technology from a new vendor? Yes, it happens but it is not easy.
I guess it is not a coincidence that a number of companies floating around sell to/service consumers as the first target market-companies like Onfolio, Eurekster, and Datapod.
