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Comdex: Plenty of stress but little action

Microsoft ends up as focal point amid show chaos

he high-tech orgy known as Comdex Las Vegas offered up its usual substance-free pomp this year. Booth bunnies beckoned, emcees exhorted, and demo-demons demonstrated. Not much seemed to lurk behind all the preternatural enthusiasm, however. Case in point: After hearing that a competitor had just announced a cutting-edge storage technology, one executive cynically replied: "Yeah, I heard they're shipping press releases in volume."

The search for the coolest gizmo at Comdex continues. Disappointingly, though, no one has developed products to make hordes of conventioneers get out of the way, free up constantly jammed phone lines, or prevent hearing impairment from ear-splitting booth displays. On the first day of the show, one reveler was found squeezing his way out of the main exhibit hall and shouting to a friend, "This is nuts!" The doors had been open for only 15 minutes.

Microsoft vs. the world
Is Bill getting nervous? You might make the case that the Microsoft Corp. CEO has always been anxious in the Andy Grove-esque sense of the word, but Comdex may have shown that Microsoft is entering into a new phase of paranoia. The company's stock price has flattened in recent months, its business practices are under renewed attack from both the government and industry players, and Microsoft employees don't seem to be quite as smug as they used to be.

This paranoia was evident in Microsoft's unified Comdex marketing message: "I love my PC," printed with the heart symbol, à la the classic "I love NY" marketing message of years ago. Just as New Yorkers try to convince tourists that they can visit New York without assault, Microsoft seems to be trying to say that you can use your PC without getting robbed. Gates' Comdex keynote addressed his love for his PC, and Microsoft seemed to force the issue in its press packaging. Yet Microsoft's latest strategy is everything but "I love my PC." It's more like, "I love my multiprocessing Windows NT Server, my Intel Corp. Pentium-based NT Workstation, my NetPC, my Windows CE handheld, and my Windows terminal." The company is coming out with an OS for just about every form factor imaginable. Call it shotgun marketing: Cut a wide enough swath and you're bound to hit something.

Speaking of Microsoft CEOs, Gates managed to interfere with press meetings when he unexpectedly showed up for IBM's Human Computing demonstration in the IBM press room. Human computing, as demonstrated by IBM researcher Mark Lucente, is an experimental new interface that uses electro-holography and 3-D imaging. In this model, the computer adapts to a human's interface--speech, hand gestures, and body position--instead of humans adapting to computer interfaces such as the keyboard and the mouse. Very Jetsons-like. Gates has been saying for some time that the industry needs a new interface, so we're guessing that his attendance at the IBM demo was part of that effective Microsoft technique--borrowing the best ideas and putting them into their own products. Could we see the holographic interface in Windows 2001?

Hurricane Comdex
One would be hard pressed to discover the eye in the midst of the hurricane at Comdex. But Novell Inc.'s jumbo-sized network yielded a sanctuary.

A security guy who looked about as excitable as a guard at Arlington National Cemetery stood watch outside the network control room and looked serious enough to turn CEO Eric Schmidt away if he didn't have his hall pass. It w as here that Novell's architects directed what the company called Connecting Points, an intricate web woven from Novell GroupWise 5.2, BorderManager, the IntranetWare platform, NDS (Novell Directory Services), and Bay Networks Inc. hubs and switches. Compaq Computer Corp. set up a total of 300 workstations in five locations at the show.

This home-grown intranet granted access to E-mail, scheduling, and events listings for conference attendees at the show, as well as from their hotel rooms through dial-up access, 24 hours a day. By midweek, the system was ferrying 1.7 million messages daily.

From the vantage point of the control room, one could see all the people swirling around, their curious eyes peering in. They were still in the throws of the hurricane.



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Originally on http://www.lantimes.com/97/97nov/comdex.html

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