Thursday, January 24, 2008

Have I seen a MAC in Windows clothing?

Following the morning session with CNBC the CEO of Lenovo called me over to show me his newest laptops about to be released. They have come up with a super light very thin powerful laptop meant to compete with new Apple Mac Air. No hard drive, all flash memory, DVD drive and a number of other interesting features. Also very cute light weight home laptop for the non heavy user...very pretty...maybe they are getting somewhere.

That demo was matched in its own way by one later in the day. As I was sitting in conversation with Nick Negreponte he pulled out his new super cheap lap top for kids in developing countries. It was actually quite impressive...it might make it yet...but the takeup has been fairly slow.

The carbon trading dinner was quite interesting. There was a pretty broad consensus that some form of carbon caps and trading system is inevitable even if problematic. I challenged that but was pretty much on my own. Sir David Kay Tony Blair's Chief Scientist, now retired, described a new institution they are building in Britain, a climate bank to balance the impulse of the Bank of England. An old friend, Congressman Ed Markey gave a very optimistic little impromptu speech on how the US political landscape is changing in a positive direction with regard to climate change. I basically agreed with him. Following dinner he gave me a ride back up to the Belvedere hotel for late night events and we carried on an intense conversation on how far the Congress really needed to move if they were really serious about climate change.

Well it's after 1 and I am headed for bed.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for posting, Peter! I'm vicariously enjoying the Davos experience...