Walking around in the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center for COMDEX is like taking a walk in the future. There were over 2,000 vendors demonstrating all kinds of new electronic toys and computing devices. Note that I didn't say "computers," as there was actually very little emphasis on the personal computer as it's currently known. The official theme of COMDEX'99 was "The Post-PC Era," and in keeping with this theme the personal computer took a backseat to other types of computing devices and the so-called "information appliance."

In my opinion, Sony had the best booth of the entire show. They were emphasizing three new product lines, plus teasing attendees with advanced prototypes. Sony is a strong proponent of the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial connection, which they call "i.Link." They are also putting their considerable marketing strength behind the widespread adoption of a solid-state storage technology known as "memory sticks", one of which is shown at right. Memory sticks come in several capacities and act as a disk drive when inserted in a computer, such as the popular Vaio series. But memory sticks are also used in Sony's new MP3 Walkmans, in their digital cameras, and even in their digital camcorders. A memory stick is about the size of a piece of chewing gum. One of the most impressive advanced prototypes they showed was a digital camera that's about the size of a credit card, and only about twice as thick! It even had a built-in flash, and stored the digital pictures on---you guessed it---a memory stick.

New MP3 players were present in abundance. There was even a personal jukebox device, about the size of a small box of chocolates, that stores 81 hours of near-CD quality music. Voice recognition software has definitely matured, so much so that a half-dozen companies had very large booths demonstrating their continuous speech recognition products. Experiencing a real-time language-to-language translator was really like something out of Star Trek: you speak in English, and out of the speaker on the portable translator come your words in Mandarin (or several other languages). Perhaps the three biggest items at COMDEX that resonated with me were Windows 2000, large flat-panel displays, and e-anything. 

[back to the top]

Windows 2000

Microsoft had a huge presence at COMDEX'99, in support of the forthcoming release of the Windows 2000 operating system. There's no doubt that Windows 2000 has the Redmond marketing machine in high gear. An emphasis was placed on demonstrating the enterprise-level scalability of Windows 2000. For example, they had five machines simulating the handling of 20,000 simultaneous users and even had one of the machines drop out of the cluster in an unscheduled manner; the system kept on running smoothly.

In addition to the operating system itself, Microsoft had many corporate partners demonstrating new products that rely on the capabilities of Windows 2000. In particular, they had many companies offering e-commerce solutions. Noticeably absent were both Apple and IBM; I think I only saw a single iMac in the entire show. 

And what about Linux? It was there, but not to the degree that I thought it would be. I think the biggest Linux push was from Sun Microsystems, who were giving away free CDs with their newly-acquired StarOffice product. Sun also had their new thin-client devices on display, as did National Semiconductor with their Windows Terminals.

[back to the top]

Flat-Panel Displays

Probably the most widely used new technology were large flat-panel displays. Just about every vendor was using them to illustrate their software products and conduct demonstrations. The manufacturers of the displays, such as Phillips and Panasonic, had truly impressive setups. We're talking 60-inch plasma displays at XGA resolution and beyond that are just 4 inches thick and weigh under 90 pounds. The picture was rich and viewable from a wide angle. 

The plasma displays were a highlight of several "houses of the future" exhibits too. If you've seen the Phillips advertisement where they hang a TV on the wall of a very narrow sitting room, you get the idea. Coupled with ubiquitous networking throughout the home, and you had a very attractive living space indeed. 

There were also many LCD-based flat panel displays being used, including new 22-inch models that looked like high-resolution photographs hanging on the wall. It's true that these flat-panel displays are more expensive than conventional tube technology, but that's changing. I think that very soon most computers will be sold with a flat-panel display as default monitor. Flat-panel displays may also be found in non-traditional places, such as mounted into the top of a table or desk. 

[back to the top]

e-Anything

Unless you've been asleep for the past year, you know that e-commerce has become a heavily-used phrase for the digerati, second only to "dot com". But e-commerce isn't the only e-game in town. E-business, e-stamps, and more generally, the e-conomy as a whole are being affected by information technology. This "e-anything" phenomenon is having a significant e-ffect (if you'll pardon the pun) on just about everything else.

Many vendors at COMDEX where showing their latest security-related products. These products included the traditional applications, such as anti-virus software and firewall applications, but it also included some rather novel devices as well. For example, I tried out an retinal scanning system than took a picture of your eye then used this image as a secure access mechanism. The last time I saw such as thing was in a James Bond movie of nearly twenty years ago; today it's reality.

For small businesses, many products were available that offered "out of the box" virtual storefronts. By far, the biggest impact of e-commerce is on business-to-business transactions. The next-generation markup language, XML, will play a significant role in this area. Consequently, the software vendors that sell HTML editors and Web site tools were demonstrating their nascent support for XML.

[back to the top]

Final Comments

Is COMDEX worth attending? I'd have to say yes. The sheer number of vendors, the excitement of witnessing so many new products, and the atmosphere of Las Vegas combine to make this a unique event. This year I only saw the exhibits; maybe next year I'll attend some of the other sessions as well.

Since most of the conferences I usually attend are academic in nature, it was very interesting to experience an event more commercially-oriented. COMDEX provides you with singular perspective on information technology, a perspective that's not really available anywhere else. 

[back to the top]

Related Information