Not certain I’ll be able to make it this year. Perhaps Saturday. Pretty busy studying. Let me know if this is really something I can’t miss.

By the way, do you know why Steve Jobs doesn’t give a Keynote this year? Because Parisians are snobs (a generalization that I can confirm, as a Parisian myself but a citizen of the world, being true)

Check this out: “Everyone know Parisians are snobs. So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that an unshaven, middle-aged American, speaking English and dressed in cuffed jeans, sneakers, and a worn black T-shirt, was rudely turned away from the bar at a lavish fete inside Paris’s Musee d’Orsay on September 16, 2003. Except that the man was Steven P. Jobs, the cofounder and chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., and it was his party. And some bash it was.” (source: FastCompany magazine)

Steve must’ve been pissed off enough not to bother to come and give a Keynote to such people. That’s pretty understandable.

The rest of the article, a very good article on Apple, Steve Jobs and innovation, right here (many thanks to Julien H. – see comments, for the link).

Addendum Sept. 13th 2006: Steve Jobs seems to have actually given a Keynote at Apple Expo Paris 2006 yesterday. Could someone provide me with some explanation? Jobs had publicly announced he wouldn’t give such a speech in Paris… 

According to Dimitri Dagot, head of the Master of Information Technology at Ecole Centrale Paris, a very prominent school of engineering I’m currently studying at, the two best French software development teams are Dassault Systèmes and Business Objects.

Amadeus and Microsoft also appeared in the conversation to be probably at least as good. But these are not 100% French. Amadeus is trans-European and headquartered in Madrid (with software development teams in Sophia-Antipolis, on the French Riviera), and Microsoft sends after some incubation time its top programmers to Redmond, next to Seattle.

The overall level of French software development teams is excellent, 99% of the software industry players sticking to local engineers rather than outsourcing abroad. As a proof, Indian IT consultancies Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Cognizant Technology Solutions & InfoSys have recently been opening French branches.