Technology companies now hate the messenger

In the beautiful city of Lisbon, an IT gathering hears media is obsessed with short-termism rather than the long haul

OK, this doesn't have a lot to do with technology. But having spent much of the last week in Lisbon for a tech conference, I was struck by some startling differences between that city and Dublin.

Until recently - when Lisbon's hosting of Expo 98 gave the city the opportunity to fabulously revamp a tattered waterfront industrial area into a sparkling event and conference centre - the city crouched in the back of the mind as one of western Europe's poor and grubby cousins.

Dublin, of course, had the same reputation not too long ago, before EU and foreign investment money was transfused into the city's then-weak economic veins. I first visited Dublin in the early 1980s and came to stay in the middle of that decade, when the whole atmosphere was grey - clouds, coal and gloomy unemployment figures all cast their pall across the city's consciousness.

Now, despite Lisbon's pleasant, Mediterranean-style seediness and some certifiably crumbling buildings, the city outshines Dublin in many ways. Its San Francisco-like setting helps - its tram-traversed hills lean back from the enormous, miles-wide mouth of the river Targus, which meanders into the Atlantic. Two long bridges span this waterway, one a two-towered suspension bridge similar in appearance to the Golden Gate. The laid-back people, a cultural stew of European Portuguese and all the ethnic groups from the state's former African, South American and tropical island colonies, relish their native seafood and produce and locally-produced wine, just like the Californians.

Like Dubliners, they are generally friendly and loquacious and in no hurry, certainly not so busy that they can't stop for a coffee or a drink and a gab. They exude a quiet pride and pleasure in their city, not unlike the shift in Irish sensibilities as the country was drawn into the economic uplift of the last decade.

But this city of similar size to Dublin has a clean and efficient underground metro built through the heart of the city and around its hills, in the same years that we seemed unable to draft a similar plan over here.

Its mix of black, brown and white skins is as indifferently comfortable as it is in New York, and the culture, foods and customs of all those places fold back into Lisbon's unique sense of identity. Its restaurants have the kinds of prices and variety to make you want to dive into a new one each day, not like the bland, overpriced mediocrity of so many Dublin tourist traps.

And finally, Lisbon feels Portuguese. People shop locally in lively neighbourhoods. The main shopping streets in the city centre are full of small speciality shops and Portuguese department stores (a store selling nothing but sardines! A store selling corks! And brooms!). Sure, you can find Mango and the French bookstore chain Fnac and other branches of international shops speckled here and there, but the entire length of the streets have not been turned into a string of multinational conglomerates, as has happened almost completely on Grafton Street and in all Dublin's shopping centres. In Lisbon, you don't feel you are shopping in High Street UK - you are, very definitely, in Lisbon.

Perhaps Lisbon has not had enough prosperity yet to throw out all its national uniqueness. But somehow I don't think it will; it doesn't seem to believe it has to be something else. My short stint in this beautiful city left me musing about why Dublin seems to want to emulate Manchester or Leeds or London, and not just be itself.

But turning to the more technology-oriented purpose of the visit - I was there to attend a conference hosted by German software giant SAP. During a press conference by the company's joint chief executives and chairmen, Mr Hasso Plattner and Mr Henning Kagermann, Mr Plattner made a complaint I have heard from many chief executives in recent times.

The media focuses too much on short-term performance of companies. It devours vast swathes of information on every aspect of a company's health and activity, and spits it back out to a readership, encouraging more short-termism. It offers up every fragment of rumour, every whisper of a potential deal. It speculates on whether the US will go to war.

All these things weigh down the stock market, promote uncertainty, delay recovery, ignore the need for companies to make tough decisions now while looking to the long term. "If journalists constantly analyse the health of the patient, then they may influence whether the patient recovers, and the patient may not recover at all," said Mr Plattner.

All of this may be true. But it struck me as deeply ironic that so many of the companies taking this line are technology companies. These are not only the companies that have created the information economy - they are also the ones telling their customers that they need to buy their equipment and software and consulting services to learn how to manage this vast flow of information.

Indeed, this was a fundamental plank of both SAP chief executives' keynote speeches. "There's some Schadenfreude around the fact that the 'new economy' failed. But we have to remember that there's a shift to an information economy and that has not ceased. With the internet, there is information in abundance," said Mr Kagermann during his speech.

Companies must learn to operate in this data-soaked world, he warned. Quite. Technology companies, you cannot sell the revolution and then grow indignant that you, too, are affected by the data flow you have helped create, a changed corporate world in which you are claiming to offer some guidance.

You share that painful challenge with your clients, and blaming the messenger - a messenger answering the call of a readership eager for the information your technologies help to make available - is futile.