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flux@microsoft.com

Douglas Boling

The Incredible Shrinking Comdex

wallows return to San Juan Capistrano, salmon swim upstream, and the followers of the great IBM-compatible computer return to Las Vegas each fall for Comdex. It's not just a tradition, it's actually a good thing. Not to walk like drones up one aisle and down the other, but to see people you see only once a year in the city that Bugsy built.       Actually, if the level of attendance at Comdex is a barometer of PC industry health, then things aren't that great in PC-land. While the floor was crowded on that first Monday, things cleared out quickly as the week drew on. By late Tuesday, you could get a cab without waiting, and by Wednesday the floor was almost empty.       Not that a lack of crowds is bad. By clearing the aisles of gawkers crowding around every booth only in search of a cool pen or a silly button, you could actually get to the folks in the booth who knew about the product being displayed.       You have to wonder about some of the people that go to these conventions. All they seem to do is drag around those infuriating pull carts filled with every brochure from every booth. No one could possibly read all those things.       The most amazing example of the silliness of some of these convention-goers was the hundreds of bozos who actually went around the floor wearing boxes on their heads plastered with the name of a company that shall remain nameless (so as to not encourage copycats next year). Good thing there weren't any mirrors around or these guys might have realized how stupid they looked. Maybe the shrinking size of Comdex is a good thing.       Something else that you couldn't miss was the size of the Microsoft booth. If that booth gets much bigger, they should just rename the convention "Bill-dex" and be done with it. While a huge amount of space in the Microsoft booth was devoted to Microsoft's own products, at least half of the booth was a maze of those tiny partner booths filled with vendors who didn't have or weren't willing to spend the money for their own booth.       Across from Microsoft was the almost-as-large Philips booth. Harking back to the old WordPerfect days, the booth had a big stage with the loudest show around. Acrobats, dancers, and singers flipped, twirled, and sang, drowning out conversation for hundreds of feet. This must have cost a fortune, but I fail to understand how it sells products. Fighting my way past the acrobat-gawkers, I did find a neat programmable TV remote control. The box has an LCD panel with a touch screen across the entire top of the control. The unit then reconfigures the display depending on the box (TV, VCR, CD) that it's controlling. While the system has its shortcomings, what first-generation product doesn't? This looks like it has possibilities.       A number of vendors were showing ultrathin notebooks that compete with the snazzy Sony VAIO 505. Sharp was showing its Actius. Like the Sony model, it has a Pentium II cpu and a fairly large hard disk. The problem with both boxes is that the battery life is abysmal. What good is an ultra portable that's only portable for less than three hours? The benefit of these lightweight boxes is lost when you have to carry two or three extra batteries to last a long flight.       Last year, I mentioned that flat panel displays were going mainstream. This year, they've arrived. Almost all the various monitor ventures have 14 or 15-inch flat-panel desktop displays in their lineup. These monitors are great since they produce a much superior image.       The best one I saw was an incredible 1600X1024 display from Silicon Graphics. Silicon Graphics' 1600SW flat-panel monitor is spec'd at a 17.3-inch diagonal, but that number is deceiving since the display is laid out in a 16:10 ratio instead of the 4:3 ratio found on typical video monitors. The display uses a digital interface, which is both good and bad. The good part is that the image quality is outstanding since there isn't a digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion that takes place when using a standard VGA interface. The bad part is that you need a video adapter designed to support the display's digital interface. SGI is working with Number Nine, which has produced a special digital interface version of their latest graphics card, the Revolution IV.       While there was plenty to see and do at this year's Comdex, it was also interesting to see what, or rather who, wasn't there. IBM, in a much-publicized announcement, decided not to attend this year. Although they didn't have a booth, there were IBMers around. After winning a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award, one IBMer from their disk drive division used his acceptance speech to invite everyone over to their business suite at one of the hotels. Perhaps IBM has it down: send the people, skip the booth.       Actually, if everyone did that, there wouldn't be a Comdex. But all in all, it's the event that makes Comdex useful. The show floor isn't where the news is made; the news is made in the deals and meetings and parties in back rooms. Back rooms and parties—the stuff Comdex is made for.

From the February 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.