COMDEX Breaks All Records

November 1994

With nearly 200,000 attendees and more than 2,000 exhibitors, COMDEX was clearly bigger, healthier, and harder to see than ever. No one can see more than a fraction of such a big show, but with the help of my vantage point, as a speaker, a member of the press, and a columnist for the COMDEX Show Daily, I had a lot of help. Here are some highlights. Together with the status report that follows, they're a kind of instant industry update.

Three keynotes helped delineate the COMDEX themes. Since these are always important, mainstream perspectives, they are good ways of filtering the COMDEX scene. The keynotes this year included:

(1) Bill Gates of Microsoft giving his vision of the future. This turned out to be remarkably like a speech I had given a few weeks ago, just an hour from his office, in Olympia, Washington. But Bill Gates has much better visuals and a few demos. More important, when Microsoft says something might happen, it brings reality much closer. This was an update of Bill's famous 1990 speech on Information at Your Fingertips, with a lot more emphasis on communication and interconnection.

(2) Bob Frankenberg of Novell talked about Pervasive Computing, Novell's new way of thinking about how networked computers will be a part of every aspect of future life. The Microsoft and Novell visions of the future, far from being contradictory are, in fact, very much in synch. They differ only in their notion of whom you should select for your vendor partner and in the details of how the technology is implemented and exactly what the dates on the schedule might be. Frankenberg also showed Corsair and Ferret, Novell's three-dimensional GUI and browser prototypes, which we've described here recently.

(3) Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, wants you to understand that nothing will stand in the way of the continuing pace of change. Intel sells computers and to guarantee their continued success in the marketplace, Grove must drive a market that is ever hungry for more and more power -- and most of it with an Intel Inside label. Grove pointed out that in 1991 at the introduction of the -486 chip a MIP cost $230, embedded in a computer system priced at over $6,000. Today, with Pentium systems available at $2500, a MIP is less than $17. No wonder we have power to spare for better and better interfaces and he sees processors becoming more integrated, powerful and cheaper (on a per MIP basis) as we go into the next century.

• Operating Systems Wars in full bloom, with IBM pitching OS/2 Version 3 and Microsoft getting the red carpet ready for the '95 roll-out of Windows 95, plus showing a still very new version 3.5 of NT, operating systems were clearly in the limelight.

• All this operating system stuff, made applications strategy a big issue. Who is doing what was the question of the day as vendors attempted to show that their operating system was attracting plenty of support. Microsoft was particularly successful in showing support for NT and pre-commitments to Windows 95 (over 200 products on the show floor).

But surprisingly, one of the strongest software commitment statements was off the show floor in the PowerPC Pavilion (an enormous mini-floor of its own, where 70+ vendors showed their wares. The trouble (as always) is that it's a divided platform, with software on multiple operating systems. You'll see a great spreadsheet (Mesa 2 from Athena Design of Boston), only to find it's not for you. But there's something for everyone, and OpenDoc's porting tools show the possibility of an easier porting path in the future for applications developed for OS/2 (one of the PowerPC platforms). There will be a separate and more detailed article on the status of OpenDoc in the next issue of TrendsLetter.

Taligent was also on the show floor for the first time, showing its CommonPoint applications environment (a development environment) and talking about shipping CommonPoint in 1995 and Taligent itself in 1996. We have a separate article on this important topic in next month’s issue.

• COMDEX has come of age with client/server hardware and software everywhere. Most of the client/server vendors come to COMDEX (but some, like Oracle, are mysteriously absent). PC vendors, both hardware and software, are busily stretching their capabilities upward as they strive to become contenders in the Next Big Thing. There is agreement that client/server has arrived; now we have to figure out how to make it work well and get everyone migrated over; the big job is still ahead.

• Communications was a big part of the COMDEX story. Some of that was an interest in wireless. Some was an interest in better LAN and WAN technology, particularly broader bandwidth like ISDN and ATM. But much of the communication noise was about the Information Super Highway, especially about Microsoft's own on-line service, announced on Monday of COMDEX week, and still available only as sketchy information (no pricing, for instance). The rest of the howl was about Internet on-ramps, servers, and services. Every vendor wants to be Internet-ready (although not every user has any idea as to why they'd want to be on the Internet). The flashiest Internet shows at COMDEX were IBM's OS/2 V3 Internet On-Ramp (with its 45 second sign-up and multi-threaded searches) and the new Mosaic-style browser from Netscape.

• Multimedia was a big COMDEX story but you had to be a member of the MTV generation to brave the multimedia section of the COMDEX floor for very long. Every booth blared forth loud noises at full volume. My system overload occurred quickly. But this is the story: the home market has embraced CD-ROM for its content; the business market is still using CD-ROM mainly for loading and only in special applications for content (but that is starting to change). The content vendors themselves are still heavily tilted toward edutainment. When we start seeing lots of business reference software, we'll know it's gone the other way. We'll also need to see CD-jukeboxes become a common phenomenon, since I'm not any more eager to play CD-roulette today than I liked diskette roulette a dozen years ago.

• Some things that you'd expect to be big news were not; they're waiting for their time in the lime light, later. PDA's, for instance, were fairly quiet. BellSouth/IBM's Simon was spotted and AT&T was showing it's Personal Links Service with Sony's General Magic front end PDA. But most of the General Magic products are still in the future (late) and Apple's Newton has cooled down to mainly a vertical market platform (calm, but fairly boring). Maybe if we'd just let the PDA's alone for a while, they'd have a chance to get ready for the market and then we'd be pleasantly surprised.

The things I like best at COMDEX: a new kind of calculation tool called GO Figure (not a spreadsheet), which we'll cover separately in a future issue; OS/2 V3, which is even better than I had hoped (and which is actually (finally) attracting new software; and a children's game/story called Freddy the Fish from Humongous Software, Buy it; your kids will love it.

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Entire contents © 1994 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.