Silicon: "End users' preferences will account for up to 50 per cent of all purchasing decisions relating to hardware, software and services within the enterprise, Martin Gutberlet, research vice president at Gartner, said last week."

Complete Story

In an illuminating interview published in the June 4 issue of The New Yorker, White House political aide Karl Rove suggested that a nexus exists between the spread of technology and a centrist-conservative outlook on the world.

"There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture," Rove told the magazine. "One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people's principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand."

Rove's point being that the proliferation of technology puts increasing numbers of people in charge of how they make a living

Yesterday, I spent my time at the Techknowlogy Summit in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We don't get too many technology or geek conventions in the state of South Dakota, so I didn't want this one go to by without a mention here at CMS Report.

Keynote Speaker

The Techknowlogy Summit is a trade show with presentations by both national and regional leaders in technology. The keynote speaker for the show was Kodak Company's Bill Lloyd, CTO, discussing his company's transformation for meeting the demands of the digital age. It was an interesting discussion on the challenges a century old company faces when needing to shift their primary products (film) over to new digital products. Kodak's current modernization efforts began around 2001 and is expected to be near completion in 2007. It was an interesting story, a story that looks likely to have a happy ending for the company and its investors.

Breakout Sessions

The show also had some breakout sessions. I attended a couple Web oriented sessions as well as a session on project management (well done). Regarding the Internet focused sessions, all the speakers were knowledgeable but I'm not convinced all the speakers fully understood who was in their audience. The make-up of the audience was made up by about half developers and half small business people (many of them small retail owners). Naturally, a business technology show should have made sure those talks had the small business owners in mind.

However, the talks were more geared toward the CEO crowd. When the speakers found that the audience didn't contain the companies with the huge IT budgets, the speakers then shifted their talk toward the more comfortable IT people. From my perspective, the small business people were squirming in their chairs and suddenly felt out of place. Oh, how often we IT people spend so much time talking about what we know and so little time listening to the needs of potential customers!