Friday, April 1, 2011

Obama Toasts Tech Heavyweights, Ballmer Not Present

In case you missed it, President Obama had dinner with some serious tech heavyweights on Feb. 17, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who's looking thin but not even remotely dead (that being said, what sort of person shows up to dinner with the President of the United States of America rocking a black turtleneck?). Here's an image from the White House's Flickr feed:

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Others around the table included outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Cisco CEO John Chambers, and venture capitalist John Doerr, who also owns the Woodside, Calif., house where the dinner took place. The main topic of discussion? Arranging the terms of surrender to IBM's Watson, who, having defeated us puny humans in Jeopardy!, is doubtlessly figuring out the next stage in its Terminator-style takeover of our nation's nuclear arsenal.

Actually, the dinner discussion wasn't nearly that pulse-pounding. "The president specifically discussed his proposals to invest in research and development and expand incentives for companies to grow and hire, along with his goal of doubling exports over five years," Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. "The group also discussed the importance of new investments in education."

Among all those executives in the White House's Flickr image, I find the absence of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer a little conspicuous. I mean, sure, Microsoft's headquartered in Redmond, Wash., but he could have flown down, right? Not all the tech world's shining lights are based in a small radius around San Francisco.

So I did a little poking around. It turns out that Ballmer was in France Feb. 16, accepting the shiny Legion D'Honneur from Nicolas Sarkozy. Maybe he decided to spend a few more days in Europe, rather than raise a glass with Obama--after all, the two apparently met earlier this year.

Ballmer's grasp of the French language, by the way, isn't bad:


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Source: http://feeds.ziffdavisenterprise.com/~r/RSS/MicrosoftWatch/~3/L5aIbMr4OKY/obama_toasts_tech_heavyweights_ballmer_not_present.html

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