There's nothing like a chief executive fest to bring out the clichés. Put four of them on the same stage in a week (well, one has handed over the chief executive role and is chairman instead) and you can see all the difficulties inherent in chief executive speeches as well.

The line-up at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco last week, on successive mornings, was HP chief executive and chairman Ms Carly Fiorina, Dell founder and chairman Mr Michael Dell, Sun Microsystems chief executive and chairman Mr Scott McNealy and, to close the show, Oracle chief executive Mr Larry Ellison.

Everyone mentioned lower costs, return on investment, the move to a more digital world, the words "scalable", "standards", "small to medium-sized businesses" and "vision".

There's a formula to the chief executive speech, which demands that they promise a "vision" of computing that gives just enough taste of the future but not so much that it scares the horses (or rather, the chief financial officer making budget decisions for the customer organisations).

Customers aren't early adopters, they're careful (and often reluctant) adopters, and while they want to be current with information technology developments, they don't want to be testbeds for some chief executive's latest "vision". Hence, better to offer a little foresight but not be worryingly visionary.

The second bit of the formula is that the chief executive reflects the concerns of the market. Thus, before the tech downturn when money was everywhere, they talked up the internet and how it could mine the information held on company computers to help them function more efficiently. Information was king.

Now that no one has any money, lower costs are king. Customers want to hear about return on investment and how technology will help them drive down costs. In addition, the big-profile company chiefs selling the goods onstage are feeling the same pinch, need more customers, and are increasingly looking to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to fill the gap.

So the speeches are awash with references to SMEs - which rarely got a look-in in speeches or business plans by these formerly big enterprise companies - and the big companies increasingly announce partnerships where they will piece together packages targeting SMEs.

Hence, the stage appearance of big name executives from four companies last week, all touting their goods plus a database product (Oracle) that once demanded highly expensive computing power that only large enterprises could afford. And thus, the democratisation of the IT market and the big conference audience.

Little project budgets have meaning to the big companies when you can aggregate them together into lots and lots of little budgets - narrow margins but a large potential market.

The only real difference in many of these speeches - beyond the obvious one of the products being sold, which demand different techie explanations and different statistics from the big IT analyst firms - is how it is delivered.

Even there, similarities abound. First, the god of conferences deigns that there should be loud (in San Francisco, ear-splittingly loud) rock music as the audience filters in. Technology is, after all, the new rock and roll, and the chief executives rather fancy themselves as the new Mick Jaggers. They are generally of the same era, of course, baby boomers made good. Like rock stars, they are always late onstage.

Then there is some sort of elaborate stage arrangement. Huge plasma screens are good. Stacks of digital screens are also good. Blue spotlights, always a favourite. Huge projected images of the speaking chief executive: check. At least one video:check. Increasingly, there will be something funny on video, too - last week, it was a Thunderbirds spoof complete with puppets of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and others during Mr Dell's speech.

After that point, it's all a matter of delivery. Carly is cool, collected and an amiable speaker, if a little bland. Same for Michael. They both make IT comfortable.

Then there's Larry and Scott. Abrasiveness and humour are their trademarks - indeed a McNealy keynote can practically work as a stand-up routine if you are geeky enough to follow all the jokes. He was in truly fine form last week, firing off one quip after another and taking little potshots at his host, Larry, to the delight of the audience.

He began by walking onstage with one of those eight-ball toys, which he referred to as his senior management advisor, and asked it a number of questions (example: "Will HP sell off its loss-making PC division?"), then offered the audience the answers from the bottom of the ball. Simple, but very, very funny.

His best line came during his press conference. Asked if he were sincere about shaking hands with Microsoft as they engage in discussions for the first time, he said: "We're shaking hands with Microsoft sort of in the same way that two boxers walk into the ring and touch gloves before beating the living daylights out of each other."

Journalists love such moments, when you get a straight answer and you don't feel the chief executive is consulting a personal eight-ball before offering an answer.