Many years ago at a computing conference in San Jose, a friend and I duck into a lecture theater to chat about a business deal. We think it is deserted . . . it isn't.

Standing at the front of the room, alone and practicing for a keynote is none other than Bill Gates. My friend and I retreat to another room without so much as an I'm-not-worthy or a hello. We've been kicking ourselves ever since. We didn't SAY a thing. I mean, here we were with the guy who created the personal software industry, a guy who would have never met with us, who would never have taken a call from us. And we just ran away.

I often think about what I should have said to Gates. I give myself a different answer every time. Today, I would say that I might have grumbled a little about Excel, as well as have given some praise for it too.

The grumble would be for how easy it is to slip up in Excel. One incorrect or missing cell reference and it's posssible for your whole spreadsheet to go awry. Next week, NanoMarkets will release its first report on the market for thin-film and organic photovoltaics materials: Materials Markets for Thin-Film and Organic Photovoltaics. I'm just through with the crunching the numbers. The first time around, the revenue totals broken out by photovoltaic (PV) technology (Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), organics, etc.) totaled to more than the revenue totals broken out by type of material (photoactive, conductor, etc.). Then I realized, I'd left the substrates out of the materials breakout.

My praise to Gates would be for how much Excel has made possible for users to do with spreadsheet technology. Excel spreadsheets power NanoMarkets' whole evolving thin-film, printable and organic electronics market model. Just the process of putting information together to make our model yields invaluable insight into where money will flow into the market and where it won't. It puts flesh on the bone of casual qualitative statements about market opportunity.

In the numbers that I have grappled this week, I began with confirmed announcements of openings of thin-film PV plants and then traced that down to what these openings will mean in terms of materials consumed. We project $1.8 billion in thin-fim photovoltaic (PV) materials sales by 2010.

That's quite a big number. Almost enough to keep my friend Bill Gates happy. Much of what the projected number comes from are new markets for old materials. For example, the active material in the amorphous silicon flavor of thin-film PV is deposited from silane gas. Not too exciting perhaps, but that's $490 million of the $1.8 billion; a nice new opportunity for the gas makers. (I am all in favor of gas men.)

There are sexier bits to the PV materials markets. Insiders remain excited about the prospects for CIGS. It's hoped that CIGS will yield high performance at low cost. The CIGS market belongs to the firm that can get the active material correctly formulated. Is it an ink? Is it gas? Is it a sputtering target? In any case, our Excel spreadsheet says the CIGS market will be worth almost $245 million by 2010.

And then there are those pesky organic materials. Development in this area is not mature, with a lot of catching up to do to other options. We don't expect materials of this kind to generate large amounts of revenues for PV applications for quite a while. By 2015, organic and hybrid PV will probably require about $225 million in materials. That's not just the photoactive material, but substrates, encapsulations and various kinds of conductors. That amount isn't enough to birth the next Microsoft, but it's not chopped liver either.