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. | 
