Microsoft's Bill Speaks, Tiqit Wows

Las Vegas, Nevada: 11PM. UK time: 7AM. Biological Clock: Screwed.

I REALISE I have to get this written and off to Mad Mike and the London Lads before I fall over from sleep depravation. An early flight, 3-hour time difference, and a late evening are pounding away, the bed calling my name louder than the gentlemen clubs.

Let it be said that while Bill Gates was 20 minutes late to speak, he gives a good show, specifically his evening Comdex keynote before an audience of 2,500 at the MGM Grand. His Microsoftness has labeled the next 10 years the "Digital Decade," an era where the simple PC learns to play with new devices and services, a "deeply digital" experience for the end user at the office and the home. After reviewing industry highlights and playing a rather amusing parody video called "Behind the Technology" with cameos by P. Diddy, Bill Clinton, John Scully, and others, he and his supporting cast launched into preach mode.

Among the hot buzz he wanted spun was the "Smart Display," formerly codenamed "Mira." The concept is simple - a wireless touchscreen LCD monitor. Keep it clipped in a stand when you want to do work and unclip it so you can tote it around the house and surf on your couch. Viewsonic has announced two smart displays and is taking orders for January '03 shipping, while Phillips and others are expected to announce product 1Q03. Shared browsing, a beta of Movemaker 2, and parental controls for MSN8 also got some plugs.

Moving on to the office environment, Gates pulled a pair of Pocket PCs out of his pants (yes, he had deep pockets), new products from Dell and HP, before moving onto his big Office news - the coming addition of two new pieces of software to the Office Suite - XDOCS, for XML processes, and OneNote. The OneNote program appears to be the Swiss Army Knife solution to organizing bits of data across PDAs, e-mail, notebooks, and tablet PCs, OneNote will work with data types ranging from plain text to Ink to audio and graphics and looks like an application to move Tablet PCs.

Gates also announced a partnership with Kinkos using .Net services and technology. Microsoft has written a plug-in with the associated services to allow end users to treat any Kinkos copy shop as a remote print site. It even linked with a geo-locator service to pull up a map to show where a selected Kinkos print location was, along with an alert service to notify the user that the print job had been delivered to the local print server.

When Bill started yakking about enterprise services, I took it as a cue to run for a reception over at the Mirage hotel. Among the companies there, National Semiconductor was displaying various products utilizing their chips, including a quaint little computer made by Tiqit (www.tiqit.com). The Tiqit Computer is about the size of a standard but fat (450 pages) paperback book, but denser because of its hard steel shell, 10 GB hard drive, and high-quality LCD display. A lithium-ion battery provides between 3.5-4 hours of run time, depending on the application and it also has a USB 1.0 port, Type II PC-Card slot, sound port, SD slot, docking port, and IR port. It runs an embedded version of Windows XP and the Geode processor runs x86 code, so it can run any Windows application. Oh, yes, it also has both a mini-QWERTY keyboard in a RIM-style and a mouse-nub with buttons.

Compared to a stock PocketPC, it looks fat and feels heavy, as in "If I throw it at you, it will hurt you" sturdy. However, you would have to take the Pocket PC and put it on a scale with a bunch of other junk to equal the capabilities of the Tiquit. I chatted with the CEO for a bit but unfortunately they aren't selling them as one-offs. The company is already working on next generation hardware and repackaging the guts of the hardware into different and innovative designs.

Earlier - a Comdex backdrop moment
"Want to buy a genuine Jubilee Rolex Watch for only $1000?" "No, thanks."

This conversation took place this afternoon as I was walking from the Media Center back to my car. I did not ask to see the watch. Nor did I expect to be offered a watch out in the parking lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC to the hip). I wasn't watch shopping.

Nor am I car shopping, but Mercedes-Benz is offering free test drives this week to Comdex participants to demonstrate their new Pre-Safe technology. What either of them have to do with Comdex is beyond me other than they are both operating in parking lots in the LVCC, but the watch guy doesn't have an official location staked out. A test drive does sound cool, but my heart belongs to BMWFilms.Com, alas. You could also add "Why Fossil?" or "Why ?" to a good handful of firms that are exhibiting here but have nothing to do with IT or computer technology.

Talk about the future of Comdex is hot and heavy. Parent company Key3Media is taking a bashing over bankruptcy talk down the road and the company is definitely in the process of paring down their bloated trade show portfolio. Wagging tongues say that attendance will be around 120,000 or so, down from the highs of 200,000+ a few years ago. I don't feel sorry for Key3 as much as I do for the poor bastards who wish they had seen 80,000 attendance across several years of their shows. I believe Comdex will survive just as IBM and Apple survived bad times in the past because they've got the sheer mass to linger on where lesser organizations just go away and die.