Back in the mid-’80s, before Comdex attracted nearly every person who uses a computer on the job, it was a trade show for information technology (IT) professionals. The PC industry, it now appears, is mature enough for people to be nostalgic about the old days. Those who were around then remember it as a different world.
“Comdex was already pretty big by ’86,” says a long-time IT pro who began attending the show when he was head of networking for a computer trade newspaper. “I’m not sure, but I think we were already a bigger draw to Vegas than CES . Most of the big players – the guys from IBM, Microsoft, Lotus – stayed on the strip, but the parties would sometimes be 15-20 miles away. Everything in between was Comdex.”
“This was before the Internet,” recalls an industry analyst who was a marketing and development manager for Lotus Development Corp. in the ’80s. “E-mail wasn’t a big part of our lives when it came to communicating with people outside our company. We lived on the phone, fax and FedEx. So it was great to “see” people. It wasn’t like now, when we get e-mail from everybody all the time. The parties back then were wilder, too. Everyone was younger, less formal.”
We’ll leave discussions of the parties for next week’s installment, but we’re intrigued by suggestions from several longtime Comdex attendees that the Internet has changed the show.
“Two weeks before Comdex even happens, I become absolutely terrified to open my e-mail. Once my name goes on the show’s press list, I get a daily avalanche of product announcements, invitations to press briefings and late-night party invitations,” says one editor who has covered the conference a dozen times for the “Wall Street Journal” and “Forbes”. “Back then, all I had to do was turn on voice mail and I could avoid it all. Now if I want to check my e-mail, I have to fight through much more spam than usual. Last year, I used one of the IBM terminals to check my e-mail on the Comdex show floor. I remember I had 50-something messages. More than 40 were invitations to press briefings. Come on, can there be that much interesting happening?”
Some people think so. As always, the real action at Comdex is away from the massive McCormick Place show floors. Longtime attendees agree that if you’re not invited to some company’s hotel suite for a private demonstration of a new program, you’re not on the A-list. But, beware.
“Don’t ever agree to buy anything or agree to serve as a beta site for anything based on what you’ve seen in a company suite,” says one grizzled IT pro. “Chances are that all you’ve seen is a neat Director animation – not the real thing. When they can come to your offices and show you something real, then you can consider committing. If you commit before then, you ought to be committed.”
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Are you a longtime Comdex attendee? We want to know (specialreport@vineyard.com).
