Yesterday, I attended the half-day TechNet Innovation Summit at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium. TechNet is an organization that represents CEOs of leading high technology companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, etc. A bunch of them came to opine on "the future of the Internet," energy concerns, and the U.S.'s position in the global economy. Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Sun's Scott "You Have Zero Privacy Anyway, Get Over It" McNealy, for example, were two of the most prominent attendees.

The main event, however, was a conversation with the man, the myth, the legend -- Bill Gates himself. Moderator Charlie Rose, though he clearly didn't know the difference between an operating system and a search engine, did a great job. He started with some softballs, asking Gates about his charitable work, and then worked his way into hitting all the "hot button" topics that one might possibly want to ask Bill Gates about -- the zune, the X-Box 2, why Windows Vista is taking so damn long to get to market, what he thought about YouTube. (The answer to that last one was that foolish investors [read: archrival Google] had far overvalued YouTube's stock, forgetting that generating tons of Internet traffic is far from generating actual revenue.)



I'll have to say that I was impressed. Despite being consistently demonized by the Internet community (see right), Gates yesterday was articulate, passionate about the causes he believes in, highly intelligent on global issues, and charismatic. Yes, he let some of that famed viciousness come through, especially when talking about Google and Apple. But he has also done some real good for the world with his Foundation, which he is leaving Microsoft to run full time in 2008.


This is people lining up to ask Bill Gates questions. I like to call this picture "1984."

If that wasn't enough, I feel like I was just treated to a two-for-one movie feature. Why? Because Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger showed up, unannounced, after Gates' talk, to give a standard twenty minute stump speech. It was ridiculous.

"Now that I have been re-elected, I will terminate the girly men!"