Comdex: A look toward 2004

People love to gripe about this show. In the glory years of the information technology boom, attendees whined about hour-long lines for cabs, unruly crowds, and the incessant pushing and shoving required to get a squishy globe souvenir.

This year, only 50,000 people--at most--flew in for the five-day conference. Lines were nonexistent. So what was everyone talking about? The low attendance. In some parts of the hall, retirees-turned-security guards outnumbered visitors. Parties were scaled way back and, because of the lack of bodies, the odds of sneaking into an event without getting hit up to watch a demonstration of the performance of the J23FXi printer/fax/copier were pretty low.

Even the woman who dresses up every year in the silver hot-dog outfit for Sausage Software was not here.

Then the moment arrives, and you find yourself stuck listening to a pitch on the many virtues of retractable USB cables.

Still, despite the whining, people can catch glimpses of the future at Comdex. It's a phenomenon seen throughout history. Merchants from medieval Northern Europe once dismissed an Italian culinary fad as too expensive and effeminate to ever take seriously. However, the fork did catch on eventually.

What's coming in 2004
Monitors: Glass is in. In years past, computer makers talked of increasing performance inside PCs or hooking up to the Internet wirelessly. This year, everyone wanted to talk about the "viewing experience."

Notebook and desktop screens continue to get larger and sharper. Dell and Gateway are selling LCD TVs, and Hewlett-Packard is likely to do so soon, too. Analysts predict that a glut of factory capacity will force prices down in the coming 18 months.

Next year, flat-panel sales representatives will be relentless.

True, there is that mutual history of loathing, but in a weird way they will help each other.

Samsung will be impossible to ignore: The Korean electronics giant believes its moment of destiny is at hand and is pursuing the opportunity with an aggressive barrage of advertisements, promotions and products. "We have put a brand-new cell phone out in the U.S. market every two weeks since mid-October," said Peter Weedfald, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Samsung Electronics North America.

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Everyone will get into the antispam market: This year, you couldn't walk 10 feet without running into someone hawking an antispam solution. Most spam is actually not for marketing purposes, said Matthew Moynahan, vice president of product management at Symantec. Instead, it largely comes from people selling counterfeit software or other questionable goods and from organizations trying to scam credit cards. After Symantec shut down one spammer in Maryland, support calls dropped from 1,500 a day to 800, Moynahan said.

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Software developers, however, seem to have finally uncovered some of the glaring problems. Start-up SightSpeed has come up with a software application that takes out most of the jitter and delay so that the video images match the sound track. The secret sauce in the application is that it concentrates on the moving object in the video frame--the person--and sends less detail about the static portions, the background. Less data goes down the pipe and, hence, gets there quicker, said Brad Treat, SightSpeed's CEO.

Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard with its Troy concept PC has figured out an important rule: Keep the videoconferencing window fairly small.