Behind the scenes at Comdex
Las Vegas - The location of Comdex/Fall '97 here last week proved especially apt: Both the gambling capital and this year's installment of the annual high-tech show seemed to value glitz above substance. Outside the convention centers, show goers faced a city built on bright lights and flashy spectacles. Inside, the event focused more on branding than on technology.
The show floor was overwhelming, filled with large booths and even larger signage. "The restrooms are the only place without a sponsor here," one industry insider remarked.
Unlike conventions past, large vendors focused more on shipping products than on pie-in-the-sky technology, said Frank Huang, CEO and chairman of UMAX Data Systems Inc. of Taipei, Taiwan (the corporate parent of scanner vendor UMAX Technologies Inc. and Mac cloner UMAX Computer Corp. of Fremont, Calif.).
Appropriately, the UMAX booth featured lots of logo and product lines familiar to Mac users, as well as PC desktop systems, servers, a Network Computer and a variety of memory add-ons. It boasted a spiffy sports-bar theme, replete with gymnasts and Raiders football cheerleaders.
"More and more people are thinking the same," Huang said. "It's hard to provide something different and persuade them that it is different." He added that since big vendors are the ones making money, branding is a key. The computer industry is "more and more like a commodity market: products with labels," Huang said.
While I appreciated much of the techno-cornucopia, I found little that overwhelmed me on the show floor, especially when it came to the many consumer computer systems. A briefing by analysts from Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp. described the explosion of new PC platforms, some competing with each other for a small slice of the market (see https://www.zdnet.com/
macweek/mw_1145/nw_pcs.html). After a short while, all the systems looked alike to me.
By contrast, I found the products that will make a technological difference off the floor in "breakout rooms" for Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) and IEEE 1394. In previous years, these interfaces were visible only in technology demonstrations. This year, however, the vendors showed a variety of products, some now shipping and others due over the next half-year (see 11.24.97, Page 1).
These interface cards, storage devices and networking products will break new ground for performance and usability for digital video and prepress applications.
I had a great time viewing demonstrations of digital video downloaded via FireWire instead of captured the old-fashioned way. (The analog guys had trouble grokking the difference). And playing with multiple streams of uncompressed video was a heady experience.
The contradictions of my Comdex experience is captured by a question from the medieval philosopher Moses Ibn Ezra: "How can you expect me to be perfect ... when I am so full of contradictions?" I had a fine time, but not the one I expected.
Perhaps ironically, platforms this year were not the stars of the largest U.S. computer show. Instead, the Comdex highlights were provided by the arrival into prime time of FireWire and FC-AL interface technologies.
David Morgenstern, MacWEEK executive editor/news, welcomes feedback at david_morgenstern@macweek.com.