Nobody who attended Fall Comdex, the ultimate technology show, this year could doubt that the PC industry is vibrant and competitive. The exhibition, which took place in Las Vegas in mid-November, was a feast of innovation.
Computers continue to get faster, cheaper and smaller, and they're beginning to morph into new forms designed to meet specific needs.A crowd of thousands roared their approval at a keynote speech when Silicon Graphics (SGI) demonstrated its new Visual Workstation, which allows video images to be manipulated in real time in highly sophisticated ways. The crowd saw the computer make a video image ripple like the disturbed surface of a pond and display multiple images -- including video images -- on the faces of a rotating cube.
Computers with this kind of capability sold for more than $100,000 until recently. But SGI announced that the Visual Workstation will cost less than $4,000, without a monitor, when it goes on sale in January. The machine will help usher in an era of low-cost visualization tools, video editing and special effects. Immersive 3D games will be amazing.
Less powerful, but in many respects no less remarkable, were myriad handheld computing devices, some of which can be networked with infrared or radio signals. These devices, which included telephones, electronic tablets of various sizes, miniature notebook computers and even computerized appointment books the size of credit cards, promise to redefine how many people access information on the go.
One of the most intriguing handheld devices was the Hewlett-Packard CapShare, a 12-ounce scanner that you wave in a freeform motion across a document to store a digital image of it. The software inside the $700 CapShare spots overlapping parts of the image and matches them to construct a seamless picture of the document. The CapShare can store 50 black-and-white pages internally or transmit the images via infrared link to a laptop computer.
Devices are shrinking in size, but the show itself was as massive as ever -- 2,400 exhibitors filling 2.5 million square feet of space to introduce 10,000 new products to 220,000 people from 131 countries.
Think of it this way: The total floor space was larger than 500 football fields, and the noise levels sometimes rivaled those of stadiums, too.
The number of exhibitors was up by 300 compared with 1997, thanks in part to participation by eager, and often innovative, start-up companies.
Some Comdex regulars, such as Intel and IBM, didn't have much public presence this year. Their spacious regions of the exhibit floor seem to have been taken over by consumer electronics companies, many of whom showed stereos, televisions, VCRs, game consoles, cameras, camcorders and other digital appliances connected together on home networks of various kinds.
At Comdex two years ago I was taken by the profusion of digital cameras, which were filmless and convenient but usually didn't give great photos.
This year digital cameras costing a few hundred dollars tended to offer much better images and value, and digital camcorders were plentiful. One 2.6-pound notebook computer, the Sony PCG-C1 VAIO, has a built-in digital camera. This machine, which is available only in Japan so far, is aimed at real-estate agents, among others.
Last year I was dazzled by flat-panel monitors, which were novel and expensive. Back then they started at about $2,500 for small-screen models and rose to more than $6,000 for 18-inch displays.
Flat panels have become commonplace in the intervening 12 months. One reason for this popularity is that they've come down in price, with many selling for less than $1,000. Even stunning 18-inch monitors -- such as the NC MultiSync LCD1810 -- go for less than $3,500. These certainly aren't low prices, but they're headed in the right direction.
Of course, you can still pay a small fortune for a really big flat-panel monitor. Samsung showed an amazing 30-inch display, with all-digital electronics and 1200-by-1600 resolution. It should hit the market next year -- for $30,000.
The price may be prohibitive now, but within a few years flat-panel displays as good and big as this will cost far less.
Falling prices and rising performance are transforming digital storage, too. Several companies showed removable media that store large quantities of data in very small spaces.
SanDisk announced a variety of products, including a 160-megabyte CompactFlash memory card that is roughly the size of a matchbook and will cost $465 when released in early 1999.
Castlewood showed ORB, which is similar to in size to a 1.44-megabyte floppy disk but which stores 1,500 times as much data -- 2.2 gigabytes. The drive costs $199 and each disk is $30.
Sony showed its "memory stick," about the size of a stick of gum, storing digital data in everything from camcorders to wireless headphones to framed digital photographs. The highest-capacity memory stick held 8 megabytes of data and cost $40.
The standardization of PC components has allowed companies to build computers in a tremendous variety of forms. Xybernaut showed a PC that you wear on your belt and that responds to voice commands for hands-free operation. The display is an eyepiece mounted on your head.
As I roamed the Comdex floor, I was looking for nothing so exotic. Instead, I made a point of trying out the keyboards of the very thin computers. It's hard to make a thin keyboard that feels "right," and nobody's really done it, although the keyboard of Toshiba Libretto 110 was better than most.
Technology kept catching my eye. A digital microscope, from Inabata, displayed magnified images on a video screen. It could improve how science is taught. A PC card, from Mobility, let a laptop hook up to an external network, monitor and keyboard. It could improve how people use laptop computers in the office. Play, Inc., put a video-editing suite in a $6,500 box connected to a PC. It could open the video-editing market to lots of new companies.
The world is on the move. To see the fruits of competition and innovation, there's no place like Comdex.
Questions may be sent to Bill Gates' by e-mail. The address is askbill@microsoft.com. Or write to him care of The New York Times Syndication Sales Corp., 122 E. 42nd St., New York, NY 10168. Questions of general interest will be answered in this column; Bill Gates regrets that unpublished questions cannot be answered individually. (C) 1998 by Bill Gates. Distributed by New York Times Special Features