Rob Pait, director of global consumer electronics marketing at Seagate Technology, said Seagate is transitioning into a company that answers the needs of the digital generation. Thus the company's with the consumer-friendly name 'DAVE,' as opposed to a scary genius name like 'Newton.'

Answering the needs of the digital generation was Pait's way of saying Seagate wants to be a CE (consumer electronics) company. Obviously, Seagate saw what Apple did with the iPod and decided it wanted some of that. Pait said, in fact, that we could think of the iPod as a hard disk in hot pants.

You might say Seagate has CE envy.

While iPod technology is nothing new, Pait added, Apple has been able to wrap the consumer experience around that technology. No kidding. That's the difference between CE companies and high-tech companies. It's called marketing. And marketing is everything from product design to pricing to distribution and finally advertising.

And then, in what could be described as an oxymoron, Enrique Salem, group president of consumer business at Symantec, echoed a similar theme around wanting to capture a mass market: 'A lot of what we are doing today -- the drive to embrace the Web sphere and Web 2.0 -- is something we have been doing for a long time.'