Gates said many Web searches that generate "bad results" today will be improved by more nuanced relevancy formulas in the future, which will "take into account who you are and where you are" when you enter a query.

Google sent its chief executive and a bunch of evangelists to attend, but the firm's impending stock sale and prohibitions on saying anything that might be perceived as hyping the value of the company meant it fell to Oracle Corp.'s Lawrence J. Ellison and leaders at other companies to respond to Microsoft.

Ellison lobbed his usual tart-tongued antitrust allegations about the Redmond software "monopolist" -- even as Ellison's own bid to take over rival PeopleSoft Inc. was on trial elsewhere in California, with federal regulators trying to block his merger on antitrust grounds.

Ellison derided Microsoft for talking to European software maker SAP AG about a possible merger, talks that SAP and Microsoft have since said led nowhere. Ellison said he found it inconceivable that the world's largest software company could have bought the third-largest software maker without regulators "noticing." He suggested regulators would notice "every time Bill [Gates] plans his next monopoly."

"Maybe The Washington Post will be next," he said.

Sarcasm aside, Ellison said a major trend in business software is toward greater standardization. Five years ago, 85 percent of Oracle's software required heavy modifications when it was installed inside corporations. "Today," he said, "90 percent of the software goes in without modification."

SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann echoed Ellison on the move toward standardization, saying SAP regularly integrates new features created by smaller companies into its own software suite because customers don't want to do the messy integration work themselves.

Other chief executives, including Apple Computer's Steve Jobs and Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina, crowed that their firms were great innovators while insisting that rivals were failing to innovate.

Jobs, for example, said Microsoft's new line of Media Center computers "has been a huge flop" because they are not "seamlessly integrated" with other audio-visual devices in the home. Then Jobs trotted out a new doodad Apple will start selling next month for $129. His so-called AirPort Express performs a trick that Microsoft's Media Center computers will be adding to their repertoire this fall as well -- sending music from a personal computer to stereos elsewhere in the home over a wireless network.

One effect of having so many CEOs on stage in quick succession was to highlight their seemingly narrow focus on corporate agendas and lack of big-picture concern about the kinds of technology that might actually improve people's lives.