Nantucket Conference Report

For most of the first day of the 1.5 day-long Nantucket Conference, it felt as if we were in a post-Internet culture. The Internet hardly came up in the panel discussions. That’s because this conference is mainly about the business climate for investors. The investors tried the Net and they got burned, so they’re back to business-as-usual having learned the lesson that the Internet didn’t really change anything. And of course that’s true within this domain of discourse because the basics of venture capitalism are so primitive: I give you money now so you can pay me back a lot more money later. Here are two rocks; now, go bang them together the way your Powerpoints described. This is the process whether the dinosaurs are dying or we’re about to colonize the planets of Alpha Centauri. For me, the backgrounding of the Internet at this conference marks a milestone.

The post-Internet feel certainly wasn’t because the participants don’t understand what’s happening. Not hardly. There was an impressively high percentage of senior uber-geeks and industry heavyweights such as Dan Bricklin, Mitch Kapor, Dan Gillmor, George Colony and Bob Metcalfe, as well as CEOs of some forward-looking companies, press folks, and lead VCs. This is a group that “gets” the Internet. In fact, the Net savviness of the group helps explain why the Net barely came up yesterday. It did make for some amazing schmoozing: it’s more than a little bit of a kick to be able to eavesdrop as Mitch Kapor arrives and embraces Dan Bricklin.

The one way the Net came up repeatedly was in the form of Web services. Web services appeal to the technologists because it promises to make hard things easy through a change in software architecture, and it appeals to financial types because it’s big and obscure enough to enable smart investors to make more money than stupid, lucky ones. But, as John Benditt, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, said at the beginning of his excellent panel on biotech, if the most exciting trend you can point to is back office automation via Web services, then you are on the descending slope of the technology curve.

I actually view it a little differently. Yes, we are between major tech innovations on the Web, but there are transformational technologies on the horizon and undoubtedly ones we don’t yet know about. For example: 1. Ubiquitous access; 2. True group-forming software that mirrors our social networks; 3. True healing of the gap between the desktop and the Web (while retaining the desktop as our primary digital abode); 4. Truly useful, cheap portable electronic reading devices. Also, of course, I think we haven’t really begun to understand the most important effect of the Web: how it’s transforming our bedrock understanding of what it means to be a human sharing a world with others.

For me, the highlight of the first day was a “fireside chat” between George Colony and Kapor (moderated by CIO editor McCreary). These are two hard-headed, soft-hearted techno-humanists. Kapor continues to lead his role-model life and concluded by reminding us that working with two or three people whose life you change deeply is as important as writing software that improves the life of a million people. Kapor is currently working on open-source end-user software to challenge Outlook in the manage-your-life application space.

For the record: The first mention of Linux occurred at 11:34 in the morning in a passing remark by Dan Bricklin.

Would I come back next year? I’m less interested in the investor side of life than the agenda is, but the collection of industry folks by itself made this a really worthwhile Conference Experience for me.

(Dan Bricklin has posted photos from the conference.)

(BTW, I got through my presentation — my first focused on trying to explain what my book is about — without getting pied or pantsed.)

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