PC Expo WrapUp

The veterans at New York's PC Expo were
amazed; they remembered years when the exposition floor was jammed
with people. "It was hard to get across the room", I heard someone
say. "It was hard to pass people in the aisles."This year, no inflatable Intel beach balls were given out
this year, no water-filled mousepads, no plastic frisbees. People
wandered from booth to booth empty-handed, looking for a handout.
None came. There were no big booths, no folks dressed like gorillas
or cartoon dogs handing out CD-ROMS. To the naked eye, the show was
a flop, another dried up ghost town left over after the fast-money
speculators fled the state, leaving dead rivers and debt.To be completely honest, I too was almost fooled. The day I
arrived I was disheartened to see that the hall was almost empty.
Microsoft, Sony and Palm had their own private theme parks set up
to showcase new technology, but there wasn't much to see. Some
office routers and blinking WiFi access ports, maybe a fancy PDA or
two and shiny aluminum cases--eye candy. But then I started to
notice a few things.Open source, although not hyped, was everywhere. A fax server
by Morgan Hill, California-based Castelle, basically a black box
that acted as a multiuser hub for outgoing and incoming messages,
runs Linux. Although the screenshots in the company brochure
portray a world full of Windows, Tux is running the show.Toshiba's new home appliance, the Magnia, is a combination
multimedia and mass storage server, with a sexy web-based front end
that complements the XP color scheme wonderfully. But the boxes run
Linux. Although the systems were designed for Mom and Dad to listen
to jazz MP3s while browsing vacation photos, the real work is done
by open-source software.The rest of the hardware vendors are thinking along the same
lines. Although Microsoft is releasing its Windows Tablet PC
Edition on November 7, ViewSonic's Dan Coffman said that his
company's tablet PC is ready and developer units will be shipping
soon. The dockable machines are about as thick as a laptop but are
completely screen driven, so there's no bulky keyboard to get in
the way. "These are going to be for the IT market first", he said,
and it's clear that they'll be pretty useful. Once open-source
developers get their hands on these, the applications will be
astounding.Everyone from Samsung to Imation are working diligently to
prepare Linux drivers for their latest creations. A company called
Disk-On-Key, which makes ultra-portable USB memory sticks, pointed
out that it had prepared a patch for its flagship product, a 128MB
storage device that fits on a key-chain.The one thing that the community must start looking at,
however, is DVD-R and DVD-RW authoring. The bandwagon rolled up to
PC Expo this year in a big way, and without a compelling reason to
switch to Linux, multimedia companies that could be wooed away by
cheap clusters and great up-time will be stuck rendering and
creating video on that other desktop. The current helpings are slim
when it comes to home DVD video creation, and none of the tools
shown at the Expo seem able to withstand the ultimate test of a new
technology: can Grandma use it? But the a lot of the programmers at
the show are steering away from releasing Linux versions of their
software.Ultimately, however, someone will find a way to pull it all
together, and DVD burners will be as ubiquitous as CD-Rs are right
now.The show's tag-line, emblazoned in three foot letters above
the doors to the Expo, was "The Future is in Here". Looking at
those words from an open-source perspective, the meaning was clear.
Open source is inside everything and will be the driving force
behind the evolution of appliances and hardware in the workplace
and home. It's a way of thought that is open and financially sound
(no CFO will ever be fired for erasing the cost of software from
the books in order to raise profits). Front ends won't matter once
everything, from your home stereo to your financial data, is
wireless web-enabled. The guts of the machines in our world will
become as remote to the normal user as the clockwork in a
wristwatch.If PC Expo made anything clear this year, it's that the tech
we all knew and loved in the roaring 90s is gone, and a new idea is
emerging: people want cool stuff that works, not cool stuff that
saves us time by allowing us to plan parties and buy movie tickets
or pet food on-line. Ultimately, whose logo appears on the Start
button is meaningless in a truly wired world. The real winners will
be those that give users an incredible experience as soon as they
hit the ON button, rendering the idea of proprietary operating
systems and environments obsolete.John D. Biggs is a writer
and consultant living in Brooklyn, New York.

email: jdb252@nyu.edu