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 COLUMN
The agenda at Agenda? Focusing on the people who provide the products DON'T WORRY, I'm not asking you to attend Agenda 2000, my other October conference.
Agenda is not for InfoWorld readers -- people who buy information technology -- it is for top executives in the computer industry -- people who sell information technology. Agenda, now 13 years old, is an invitation-only gathering of computer executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and press to discuss the upcoming year. So even though it runs from Oct. 16 through Oct. 20, we don't call it Agenda 99, or Agenda 1900, but Agenda 2000. That's the easy part. The hard part is deciding what's meant by "the computer industry." Under InfoWorld's former editor in chief, Stewart Alsop, Agenda was for the PC industry. Later, as PCs came to rule, Agenda was for the entire computer industry. But now PCs are passé. The Internet rules. So, should Agenda become one of the many booming Internet-commerce conferences, or should Agenda remain a favorite watering hole for the computer industry? To put it another way, should we gather people mostly like Schwab co-CEO David Pottruck or mostly like Sun CEO Scott McNealy? Well, the invitations are out, and we've landed both Pottruck and McNealy. But, if we had to choose, we'd lean toward McNealy. While Pottruck sells things -- financial tools and services -- over the Internet, McNealy sells the computers that make that possible. I'm on the visiting committee of MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department, which has a similar identity question. An increasing number, now a third, of MIT undergraduates are choosing to major in EECS. MIT's question is, should universities shut down their physics departments now that computers are hot and fusion is cold? The answer is to distinguish between computers and computation. Few people build computers, while everybody uses them. You should not have to major in computer science to do physics. And so Agenda 2000 will not be another conference dominated by I-commerce. Instead, it will focus on the industry that provides IT products to people who, for example, use them to sell books. Agenda is generally focused on people who might advertise in InfoWorld, not on people who read it. We don't tout Agenda speakers, but I can tell you about topics I'm zeroing in on. First is Moore's Law, again. What can we expect from our industry's underlying technologies? This includes Internet bandwidth. The second is things that think and speak. How close are we to understanding speech and with what kinds of devices? Will networked computers soon include always-connected Internet devices in the kitchen -- "counter intelligence" as they say at the MIT Media Lab? Related to that topic, we're organizing a celebrity charity robot-building competition using Lego Mindstorms (www.lego.com) to benefit For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (www.usfirst.org). Agenda's third major topic is Internet publishing and commerce. We couldn't leave the industry's newest customers out entirely. The fourth is post-PC Internet platforms. What new application-software development platforms will emerge? How many different ones do we need? Will they be open-source? The fifth is enterprise computing. What's going wrong with enterprise-application development? In addition, we've invited various presidential candidates to come woo the computer industry, Mitch Kapor will be back, we'll have a new kiss-and-tell book, and there'll be heavier-than-usual schmoozing. For more information, see www.agendaweb.com. If you have any other ideas the computer industry should be discussing, please send them along. Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973. He can be reached at metcalfe@idg.net.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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