Jun 23
Holy shit, they cancelled Comdex
Since I’ve had a lot of free time lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Philosophizing, or as close as I get to it. The industry has changed a lot since I was a little kid reading Computer Shopper. In many ways, these changes are good and beneficial - from a technical standpoint, storing thousands of CD’s worth of music on one hard drive is phenomenal by itself. Many of these changes are bad - the mass adoption of Windows Media as a file format (for HD-DVD and music) means that within ten years, if present trends hold, doing things like freely moving music to a portable player or watching your DVD in three different players will likely be a way of the past.
Adding to this laundry list of good and bad, Comdex Las Vegas, the one event that I always wanted to go to since I was a kid, was cancelled this year. Yeah, I know that Comdex is really for IT guys and industry sellouts, but when I was a kid Comdex was it, man. Comdex was where everybody was. If you were anybody, you had a booth at Comdex. Of course, that’s when Peter Norton was still involved with Norton Utilities and Compaqs were solid machines.
I guess it’s part of the ongoing trend of specialty conventions - E3, Comicon, Assembly, H2k4, none of these things existed when I was a kid. Now, I’ll grant you, given the choice between Assembly or H2k4 and Comdex I would drop Comdex like a hot rock. But Comdex as an industry event has been around for a long long time.
God, I’m old.