Yahoo's chief operating officer Daniel Rosensweig chafed in a suit he rarely wore as he extolled the virtues of making the customer more comfortable during his keynote address at TiEcon 2005, held in Santa Clara, and which ended Saturday after two days of sessions addressing needs the needs of entrepreneurs across the IT spectrum.

Rosensweig, who represented its more geeky hues, came after the decidedly untechnical CEO of Adobe Bruce Chizen, who discussed Adobe's growth, and, in a recurring theme in a conference that comes after the IT industry has endured so many changes, the need to constantly adapt.

The panel discussions held in parallel after the keynote addresses were intense and often pitched industry leaders against each other. As happened when Spencer Greene of Juniper Networks shared the stage with Prem Jain of Cisco Systems in the networking luminaries panel, or Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Frank Prestipino of Oracle in the panel of software leaders.

Tam Dell'Oro, president of the Dell'Oro group, caused a small stir when she banged the table and demanded that offshoring be stopped.

"What will happen to the engineers in the USA?" she asked the audience. There were no takers.

Across the panels, from those on venture capitals to those on marketing in emerging markets to those on software and more, the recurring themes that came up to address the requirements of leaner times were: the need to study customer needs, to focus on core competencies, to stick by the rules if only to increase company value and trustworthiness, and to adapt constantly.

The annual TiEcon is organised by The Indus Entrepreneurs, a non-profit group with 42 chapters worldwide that aims to address the needs of entrepreneurs and professionals across the globe.