Almost live, at least: the auditorium at VMWorld in Cannes today had about 85% of the seats glowing with laptop screens, all Twittering like mad as each sentence fell from the lips of VMWare’s new Chief Executive, Paul Maritz.

I won’t do the CNN-style instant new shape of Western Civilisation thing, 10 minutes after walking out of the hall – but there are a few snippets that seem to me to put contexts down for future analysis.

One was that while we are all seeing end-users going nuts about netbooks, I could only see three or four netbook screens glowing away in the auditorium: the traditional laptop marketplace is alive and well in the hardcore techie sector, at least.

Two: the welcome slide featured more Eastern European languages than Western.

Three: there was more processing power in the audience’s smartphones than there was in the equipment visible on stage. This is a step change from the presentation given by Diane Greene in San Francisco 18 months ago, with a stack of servers behind her. A very long time ago, even before PCs appeared, I used to do presentations which depended on an 11-mile multiplexed modem link to go from the mainframe suite to the presentation projector, and people thought I was crazy: it’s taken until 2009 for a sizeable presentation to be done on a link being shared by all those Twittering laptops up in the gallery.