LAS VEGAS -- Quick -- who is the chairman of Microsoft, the biggest software company on the planet?
Bill Gates, of course. The answer is practically a no-brainer.Let's try another one.
Who is the president of Intel, the largest PC microprocessor maker on the planet?
Unless you're really tuned into the PC world, you probably don't know his name is Bill Barrett, and you wouldn't recognize him on the street. To drive home the point, his name is really Craig Barrett. Give yourself two computer geek bonus points if you caught that.
Well, Barrett paid gobs of money to be on stage in front of thousands of computer-industry insiders at the COMDEX computer trade show recently just to get reminded that the computer-consuming public knows Intel but it does not know Craig Barrett.
And for the forum he had, Barrett got to pitch very little about Intel or the future of personal computers except to say that government ought to stay out of the industry's way, partially because it can't keep up. "The government decision cycle is 10 times longer than the technology life cycle," he said.
That's swatting the hornet's nest, or maybe swatting back. Barrett acknowledged federal government scrutiny of Intel.
As one of eight COMDEX keynote speakers, Barrett conscripted Bill Maher, the provocatively caustic host of the ABC television talk show "Politically Incorrect," to host a trade-show version of the program that was titled "Technically Incorrect."
The event was mislabeled as a conventional keynote address, which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. Guests on the talk show included Bill Nye, "The Science Guy"; information technology industry pundit Estter Dyson and science writer and comedian Penn Jillette.
But COMDEX draws crowds of 220,000 people as much for the "show" as the "tell." Gates gave the kickoff keynote Sunday with flashing lights, multimedia productions and a motorcycle stunt man on stage.
Discussion topics Maher moderated included the divide between the technology haves and have-nots, government involvement in the Internet and the absence of female executives from high-tech firms.
But language used in parts of the exchange would have made Letterman and Leno blush and would have trashed Bill Nye's PBS ratings if the discussion about Internet pornography and computer sex would have been scripted into his show on PBS.
"You gotta have sex and shopping for technology to succeed," Jillette said.
Then Maher just had to go and ask how the Justice Department lawsuit against Microsoft would come out, and the entire panel was speechless. "Why don't you ask one of my esteemed panelists?" Barrett said after the cameras trained on him during a stunned stretch of silence that drew a roar of laughter from the audience.
Probably the best one-liner in the show followed Maher's complaint that he is surrounded by too many computers and that he can't even get the electric window on his Mercedes to go all the way up sometimes. "There are also computers with Windows that stick," Dyson shot back.