Jobs, for instance, sounded suspiciously like Gates when he signaled he has no intention of opening up Apple's popular iTunes music store to make the songs it sells compatible with devices playing music in different formats, such as Microsoft's Windows Media.
"We believe we can innovate much more if we control the technology," Jobs insisted before an audience that was all too familiar with the financial motives prompting companies to cling to proprietary technology.
Another trend that was hard to miss was how incredulous Asian tech execs are about the lack of a plan in the United States to offer super high-speed data access to homes.
Masayoshi Son, chief executive of conglomerate Softbank Corp., a big broadband player in Japan, said cable and DLS broadband services here are "so slow" that he doesn't consider them broadband. Broadband offered over phone lines in Japan is about 10 megabits per second, Son said, roughly 10 times faster than the typical speed of Internet access available from U.S. phone and cable companies. He and others blamed U.S. telecom regulations for the disparity.
Yet Verizon Communications chief executive Ivan Seidenberg reiterated his company's goal of delivering super-fast "fiber to the premises" to 50 percent of the homes it serves within five years. Seidenberg also said his firm is about to roll out its own Internet phone service to compete with challengers such as Vonage Inc. that offer discounted Internet calling.
But Seidenberg talked with greater fervor about his plan to lay fiber to doorsteps, acknowledging it was a "survival issue" for the beleaguered phone company because it will allow Verizon to offer so many new services. "The world of services will be ripe for the taking if we can get 100 megabits to the home," he declared.
He didn't mention toilets, but maybe Verizon should consider offering tech support for Toto toilets.
