Everyone would have considered it a big joke eight years ago if Ed Rendell had been asked how, if elected, he might go about attracting the Republican convention to Philadelphia in 2000.

Some in the audience at yesterday's Rethinking Philadelphia breakfast were probably chuckling when my boss, Zack Stalberg, asked Sam Katz and John Street how, if elected, they'd go about convincing Bill Gates to move Microsoft to Philadelphia.

The GOP convention's no joke, and Zack's dead-serious about getting people to think BIG about Philadelphia's future. Going after the Microsofts of the world, or growing them right here at home, has to be the goal.

That hasn't been the case recently. Yes, we have new hotels and hospitality venues, but when Mercedes and BMW were scouting North America for major new plants a few years back, Philadelphia barely bothered to enter the competition for those major employers. This region is the population center of the Eastern United States and has everything an auto company needs, yet our defeatist attitude prevented us from even trying to compete aggressively for plants costing hundreds of millions of dollars and employing thousands of workers.

We had, and have, everything they needed - workers, rivers, interstate highways and an international airport, plus multiple rail lines serving our downtown industrial area. Yet we basically sent them a brochure, and never put on a full-scale sales pitch.

We were similarly lackadaisical when Motorola was looking for a place to invest a billion dollars on high-tech manufacturing facilities. Again, we did almost nothing to sell ourselves. Yet this region can boast of having more of what Motorola really needs - 220,000 college students who, as graduates, could work for Motorola -- more than almost anywhere else on the on the East Coast.

By asking Street and Katz how they'd approach Bill Gates, Stalberg was trying to look into the future through their eyes. And both of them did pretty well.

Katz said he'd schmooze with Gates, at first, and then descend on his Redmond, Wash., campus with a carefully selected army of Philadelphia advocates selected to bowl Gates over. He'd bring a former Katz client, Paul Allen, who just happens to be Gates' first partner, plus Bill Gray, another Katz friend whom Gates trusts well enough to give $1 billion.

The region's hospitals and higher-education facilities should be packaged, Katz implied, as both clients for Microsoft products and a virtually unlimited resource for Gates' voracious appetite for highly trained and motivated personnel.

Street also observed that the region has barely begun to market the totally tax-free Keystone Opportunity Zones recently created by Pennsylvania to attract new business to the state and city. Yes, new companies might need start-up money, but paying almost no state or local taxes for 10 years is an even better deal for the company, and cheaper for the city, than a few hundred million dollars in grants and loans up front.

Just as Rendell did with hotels and hospitality, Philadelphia's next mayor must embrace this kind of big, out-of-the-box thinking. He must go after every Mercedes, Mororola and BMW that comes along, as well as the Microsofts.

He'll only win a few, and these deals are so complex that his successor will probably reap more of the benefits than he does while in office. Neither Street nor Katz really cares about that because both are driven by something even more important.

Each has children growing up here. A better Philadelphia, for their children's children, is far more important to both of them than the instant gratification of cutting a red ribbon at a ground- breaking.