At Highbrow Event, Low Blows for Microsoft

Law professor Charles Ogletree stood at the lectern in Harvard University’s venerable Memorial Hall and bemusedly told the hundreds of assembled business leaders, policymakers and other technology big thinkers that he had just won a bet.

Ogletree and his colleagues had made a friendly wager on how long it would take for a speaker at the second International Harvard Conference on Internet & Society to mention the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft--and whether the speaker would be sympathetic to the software giant or the federal government.

It was some pretty fast money for Ogletree, a co-chairman of the conference. Less than an hour into the four-day event, Oracle Copr. Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Ellison took the first of many shots at the company that much of Silicon Valley loves to hate.

“ ‘My innovation was I took what Netscape does, I made a bad copy, I included it with the operating system, and then I raised the price,’ ” Ellison said, doing a weak impression of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. “And Bill says, ‘America, all I want to do is innovate!’ ”

Indeed, this highbrow conference held last week at the world’s most august institution of higher learning often felt more like amateur stand-up night at the local comedy club.

On that score, the prize for best performance went to Sun Microsystems chief Scott McNealy.

“Microsoft has told the world that the next version of Windows will reboot faster,” he deadpanned in true David Letterman style.

Even Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s combative executive vice president, made a few nervous--and not very funny-- jokes during his speech, which was cybercast from Seattle.

Most of the jabs were met with open laughter and even applause by the conference’s 1,200-plus attendees. But Microsoft’s rivals may well have had one specific member of the audience in mind: Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Law School professor who is serving as a special master to advise U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the Justice Department’s suit against the company.

The executives took some time out of their Microsoft-bashing to share their visions of a networked future. For the most part, the speakers agreed that computer networks would become ubiquitous and simple to use like a public utility. After all, networks for distributing water and power are certainly complex, but all the consumer has to do to access them is turn a faucet or flip a switch, they said.

The somewhat schizophrenic conference offset the keynote presentations by high-tech CEOs with panel discussions on a variety of social themes. Popular topics included the widening disparity between technology haves and have-nots, the protection of personal privacy online, and how to encourage socially responsible behavior in cyberspace without resorting to government regulation.

One of the most amusing was a panel of college presidents from Harvard, Howard, Michigan and Wellesley, who spoke in self-congratulatory tones of their skepticism about the Internet.

For example, Michigan’s Lee Bollinger cited the growing popularity of his school’s libraries as evidence that students still embrace traditional forms of learning. What he apparently failed to take into account is that many students flock to libraries because that’s where the Internet-enabled computers are.

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Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at Karen.Kaplan@latimes.com.