People that live in first-tier towns like NYC, London, San Francisco and Chicago always say they cannot believe how provincial Boston is. As a native, the charge always bothers me but Boston keeps proving what a one-horse parade it runs--even in terms of the enterprise-software world--when it gets all a twitter (literally and figuratively) over the fact that Microsoft’s (MSFT) Steve Ballmer met some people in Boston (actually across the river in Cambridge I think) for breakfast on Friday morning October 16.
The home-town Boston Globe is all over the “story,” except that there does not seem to be a story. They just had a business breakfast like the last 5000 business breakfast you’ve attended. According to the Globe, the “guest list” included an eclectic bunch for sure:
- Two old enterprise-software dinosaurs, now VCs, Dan Bricklin from the 70s (Visicalc) and John Landry from the 80s (Lotus)
- A much younger dinosaur, Bill Warner, who founded Avid Technology (AVID) in the 1990s and now seems to mentor enterprise software folks
- A bunch of younger VCs (Microsoft is always on the prowl; it picked up its Chief Technology Officer Ray Ozzie in Massachusetts, not that Ballmer needed a VC breakfast to find Ozzie)
- A college president, Gloria Larson (not a college whose name you’d recognize unless you follow Division II basketball where Bentley is nationally ranked perennially; Larson has the college presidency because of politics, probably the same reason she was at the breakfast)
- A couple of leading local Internet entrepreneurs (and the head of the Mass Technology Leadership Council that designated them “leading local entrepreneurs”)
- A twit named Laura Fitton; read it for yourself; I can’t make this stuff up (actually Steve Mann is advising her so she might have something going under the twill)
The Globe is hard at work trying to find out what was discussed other than “Do you believe it snowed in Boston on October 16th?”
Looking at the guest list I see two themes: mentoring and old and new software start-ups. Take a guess at which subject Ballmer was probably interested in.
-- Dennis Byron
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