Looks like Nortel CEO Bill Owens is getting ready to sit down with "local" - aka Canadian - reporters again after he had gave a wide-ranging interview Thursday with Reuters. Owens said Nortel is sticking to its full-year revenue forecast of 10%, although some analysts believe it could be higher given the company's guidance includes a "not substantial" contribution from PEC Solutions. The company will also finally launch its new router next year, and has high hopes for India even though a wireless deal with BSNL has been a major money-loser so far. Owens hasn't sat down with Canadian reporters since June 2004 when he gave a bunch of mini-interviews (15 minutes) shortly after being hired as CEO. The fact he's willing to meet with reporters can only be viewed as a positive compared with ex-CEO Frank Dunn who found the process hard to swallow. I wonder if Owens is ready to address the whole "vision" issue beyond government, services and security.

Perhaps frustrated with the growing fascination with all things Google, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel came out swinging yesterday at the Web 2.0 conference when he proclaimed "So far they don’t seem to have a plan, but maybe they do." Semel is extremely media savvy so this wasn't a flippant statement that came out of nowhere. Clearly, he had a message to deliver, and a Q&A session was the ideal forum. Truth be told, Semel has a point because Google doesn't have a growth engine beyond search. Perhaps it's off-base to describe Google as a one-trick pony but none of its other initiatives (Okrut, Froogle, Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, etc.) have been huge successes other than perhaps driving a little more AdSense revenue. This is why I firmly believe Google is going to do something more dramatic with its $7-billion war-chest than build free Wi-Fi spots. One of the perils of having a $300+ stock price is that when growth starts to slows, analysts start to howl for something more.

Napster's Lost Potential: Don Dodge, who was v.p. of product development with Napster during the Shawn Fanning era, has an interesting insiders look at what happened and what could have happened before the P2P rebel was neutered. A point, however, you must question is Dodge's contention Napster had more than 50 million users willing to pay $5 a month or $1 a download. "That translates to about $250M a month or $3B per year. Even if Napster kept just 10% of the revenue that would be $300M per year against expenses of less than $10M. At the stock market multiples of the day that would have been a $15B IPO." The fundamental flaw in this argument is it assumes all of Napster's 50 million users would have been willing to pay for music, which is a ridiculous assumption. If Napster was really lucky, I'd willing to guess 1 million would have been a fantastic number.

Web 2.0: From all accounts, the Web 2.0 conference has been a roaring succesing - providing more evidence the conferece industry has come roaring back to health after a deadly period that saw the demise of Comdex. I wonder if Rick Segal, who's down on the whole the concept of Web 2.0 to describe the Internet's evolution, will be allowed to attend the conference next year. Given the event is not being Webcast - which seems like a strange move - the most intriguing things I've seen are Om Malik's lists of things about the conference, which can be found here and here.

Local Deregulation in Canada: So did Industry Minister David Emerson really said he wanted to see the $10-billion local phone market in Canada deregulated so Telus and Bell, et al could set their own prices? After conducting an interview with Emerson earlier this week, Bloomberg dutily reported it but the big quote to support their headline had nothing to do with deregulation and everything to do with accelerating the CRTC's decision-making process - something the the regulator is already implementing. I think Bloomberg tried to do a torque job to make a story out of a non-story. It's not like Emerson is going to tip his hat publicly before his three-person telecom review panel comes out with their report in the next three months.