What comic actor wouldn’t give his right leg to be immortalised as that peerless complex of neurotic pretensions – Frasier Crane?. I think of who I am as what I’ve done,” says Esther Dyson. It is 11am and the woman The New York Times described as “the most influential woman in all the computer world” has already conducted a breakfast meeting, given a press interview, answered a few dozen e-mails, ploughed the hotel swimming pool and been mistaken for Jenny Seagrove by a passing film journalist

Dyson doesn’t like to waste time. It is a relief, she says, to realise that she “doesn’t have to do everything”. But then, she’s already made millions and become a successful venture capitalist, publisher, technological consultant and “one of the 50 most influential people in the New Establishment”, according to Vanity Fair.

Her company, EDventure Holdings, publishes the acclaimed hi-tech newsletter Release 1.0 and runs PC Forum, the industry’s brightest talkshop. Her venture capital fund, EDventure Ventures, nurtures hi-tech start-ups in Eastern Europe and she sits on the boards of organisations as diverse as the Eurasia Foundation and the Russian Centre for Internet Technologies. She has the ear of both Bills – Gates and Clinton – and her first book about the Net, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, (recently revised and published in paperback as Release 2.1) cornered her a $1m advance and The New York Times’s encomium as “the most powerful woman in the Net-erati” Dyson herself is not particularly keen on the epithet. She agrees that it is probably true, “though unfortunately that’s not saying much”.
At 47, Esther Dyson still looks remarkably girlish. Her hair is cut an impish crop, bleached a weird orange-brown by her daily swim, she fidgets on her seat and she is dressed in a disconcerting mess of tweedy jacket, shapeless pink jumper and mangy jeans, suggestive both of effort and unworldliness.After the publication of Release 2.0, Dyson was criticised for being unrealistic about the Net’s prospects, but she insists that her optimism is reserved not for the Net itself, “which is just a medium”, but for the people using it.”If you give individuals more power, they’ll probably do more good things than bad things and so I’m in favour of giving individuals power and responsibility and respect,” she says. “My power isn’t making people do things, which is what Bill Gates can do, it’s making people see things I can only explain to people why they should do something.

They’ll do it if I make sense.”Fortunately, she generally succeeds. Only a year on from its first publication, many of the innovations Dyson advocated in Release 2.0 – such as anti- spam measures and better tools for privacy – are already being introduced into Net commerce. “I won’t say I was wholly responsible, but I was certainly instrumental in some of those things,” Dyson remarks.It is this unbending faith in her own ability to affect things that explains part of Dyson’s success. Touted as one of the Net’s visionaries, Dyson’s greatest talents lie more accurately in analysis, strategy and policy- making. It is for these that the US government has recently appointed her chairwoman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the international organisation that has been set up to oversee the privatisation of the Net’s complex addressing system.Dyson has other avenues of influence, too.

It was Dyson who suggested to Bill Gates that Microsoft invest more heavily in her beloved Russia. And though there’s no way of knowing whether Gates acted directly on her advice, she’s quick to point out that Microsoft has increased its Russian presence.Gates was once a regular at Dyson’s PC Forum and has been quoted as saying “What [Esther Dyson] writes about is what I’m interested in”. And though the association seems to have cooled of late, Dyson still appears to be faintly obsessed by the B-word. Gates, she notes, “has become an object, and people project a lot of things on to him – `the richest man in America’ – and I’m an object, too, so people project their own fantasies – `the most powerful woman on the Net’ – on to me.”There are other, less welcome byproducts of Dyson’s Net celebrity status.

At 47, unmarried and famously driven, the woman who cannot remember when she last went on holiday and only goes back to her apartment “to sleep and sometimes to read” is often portrayed as a lonely workaholic in need of a life, “the theory being that I’m so intellectual and arid and brittle and digital that I have no human feelings”. This, she insists, is simply not true.If anything, Dyson wears her heart on her sleeve It’s just that her heart is already taken up. The greatest loves of her life are and always have been ideas.Everything in her background suggested a career in academe. At 14, she was fluent in French and German and already learning Russian because “my father had been to Russia a couple of times so we knew that Russians were good even though the Soviets were bad and I thought, why not?” The daughter of a prominent mathematician and a famous scientist, Dyson spent her childhood surrounded by intellectuals and their concerns At 16, she was studying economics at Harvard It was a heady existence.