AMD's Ruiz dabbles in entertainment at OracleWorld
SAN FRANCISCO--AMD CEO Hector Ruiz devoted his opening keynote spot Monday morning to educating thousands of corporate technology types on the technology challenges facing the gaming, sports, and movie-making industries.
The 42,000 attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld show probably weren't expecting to hear about how Electronic Arts needs more technology to support online gaming. Or how Major League Baseball is buying servers to support the growth of MLB.com. But that's what they got in a presentation from Ruiz that only mentioned Oracle a handful of times, but spent plenty of time with AMD partners EA, MLB, Lucasfilm, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and Dell.
"I'm going to stray from the usual IT keynote focus on technology, and instead put the focus on the business challenges and opportunities of our industry's most dynamic customers," Ruiz said. That essentially consisted of a short introduction from Ruiz, a video from each of the entertainment companies, and a fireside chat with Ruiz and executives from HP, Sun, and Dell explaining how the technology vendors are working on products to keep you entertained.
He said little about Barcelona, AMD's new quad-core server processor, and avoided mentioning Intel, which launched new processors Monday that are likely to give AMD problems over the coming months.
Ruiz said the idea behind the presentations was to inspire the business people in the audience. "It's time that we think bigger about our industry's potential." But it's certainly more entertaining to show people videos of EA's The Godfather video game and highlights from the Boston Red Sox World Series victory than to explain why AMD's products will help improve the businesses of attendees at "the world's largest event dedicated to helping enterprises understand and harness the power of information," according to the OpenWorld Web site.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
AMD needs a real charismatic leader. This guy is a total bore. Wrong message for the wrong audience.