Optimism abounds . . . justified or not

When will the evil economy finally lift its foot off the neck of our industry?

"Soon" was the answer offered most often at last week's Demo 2003, where rarely was heard a discouraging word and the skies, if not sunny all day, at least didn't seem ready to fall on anyone's head. Speaker after speaker - on stage and in private - emphasized the approach of better times, while muttering the obligatory qualifiers.

A cynic might say rose-colored eyewear was in high fashion, but there were few cynics on the grounds.

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When will the evil economy finally lift its foot off the neck of our industry?

"Soon" was the answer offered most often at last week's Demo 2003, where rarely was heard a discouraging word and the skies, if not sunny all day, at least didn't seem ready to fall on anyone's head. Speaker after speaker - on stage and in private - emphasized the approach of better times, while muttering the obligatory qualifiers.

A cynic might say rose-colored eyewear was in high fashion, but there were few cynics on the grounds.

"It's a great time to start a company," said Julio Estrada, founder of Kubi Software, an e-mail-based collaboration newcomer that drew well-deserved praise. "The talent we've been able to put together is unbelievable . . . and our recruiting costs are zero."

Patience is again a virtue, we were told, as venture capitalists reportedly are willing to give start-ups four years to fly, nearly twice the window afforded a few years ago.

On the other hand, Demo organizers - who run this elite invitation-only event Network World owns - had to sift through only half of the 1,000 companies screened in prior years to find this show's 61 invited vendors. The quality might be higher, but such a thinning of the herd doesn't come without a price.

There might have been a quiet undercurrent of concern about the economy - and war - but a ransom note couldn't get some of these entrepreneurs to acknowledge any serious misgivings.

"We've got people paying for our beta software," gushed Liquid Machines CEO Jim Schoonmaker, who's pushing policy-based security that protects at the file level and looks nifty at the trade-show level.

"We've seen the market coming to us," bragged Buzz Bruggeman, whose ActiveWord Systems promises to save PC users time and money by saving them countless keystrokes. Comes with a cool, personal ROI feature.

"We're a recessionary product," boasted ITWorx CEO Youssri Helmy, whose NetCelera bandwidth-optimization appliance is worth a look for those still angling to cut costs.

A quartet of seen-it-all graybeards on hand for a panel discussion were happy to accentuate the positive, yet they, too, had words of caution.

"Deals are getting done, but not on the terms that the entrepreneurs I know are happy about," said Mitch Kapor, long-ago founder of Lotus and more recently a venture capitalist active in open source.

There was more talk about incremental advances than any next big thing.

"The next big thing is all the little things that make things work," said Les Vadasz, president of Intel Capital. If the show had an overarching theme, it was just that: making the things we have work better.

For example, Kubi Software surrenders to the reality that workers live in their e-mail by letting Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes users collaborate in groups using those familiar interfaces. Instead of forcing them into another application. Oddpost's snazzy demo of its Web-based e-mail service kicked the stuffing out of my preconceived notion that no one would pay $30 for what's been a freebie. And Bloomba from Stata Labs looks ready to bring order to even the ugliest in-box.