News Analysis: There?s No Business Like Show Business

Vendors great and small were peddling their latest wares at this year?s Cebit show in Hanover

With precisely 8,660 exhibitors in 26 halls, each the size of Earl?s Court, it is only possible to imagine the total number of products on show at Cebit. But a slice from each hall ? each housing a product category ? gives some idea of how the exhibition is laid out.

The network computers (NCs) took up a whole hall at Cebit, but definitions of what constitutes one of these machines varied. The jury is still out on whether the Microsoft-Intel NC spec ? announced last week at Cebit ? will create the bandwagon needed to put Oracle and its collaborators, with their NCs, into touch.

Tektronix made a big splash with its Net Station range, drawing on its past and present expertise in the X-terminal market. Indeed, it was hard to spot an NC that was not part of an Intel or Microsoft presentation. The industry can expect to see NCs in greater force later this year at PC Expo in New York.

The internet had a huge presence at Cebit. Among the search engines, Alta Vista showed a software tool ? Live Topics ? that will sort a search into different categories without the need for a predefined search.

On the tools side, Web publishing firms Asymetrix and Macromedia took time out to demonstrate their authoring tools for the Net. The latter unveiled its Internet Studio 2, which will work for both Macintosh and Windows.

The other 97 firms demonstrating their products in this category included Cambridge Technology Partners, Cognos, Informix and Lotus and Sausage Software. The latter, rather aptly named in a place that has a whole drinking place devoted to the consumption of steins of German beer and all flavours of wurst, specialises in e-cash systems, virtual reality software and online services.

Workstations and PCs are often the centrepiece at Cebit. This year, IBM demonstrated its Pentium Pro workstations, and it emerged for the first time that both PC and RS/6000 resellers will be able to sell the system. The effect on the channel is still to be discussed.

Silicon Graphics showed off its range of Octane desktop workstations. Complete with symmetric multiprocessing and a 64-bit operating system, the Octane comes with single or dual Mips R10000 processors.

Digital cameras attracted more than their fair share of interest at Cebit. It is estimated by market researchers that over 20 million units will be sold before 31 December 1999 and that attracted vendors great and small to exhibit their wares.

The biggest vendors, including Kodak, HP and Microsoft, back the Flashpix format. This technology will size up the snapshot and pick the best resolution for the job. HP showed its Photosmart printer, which will also use the technology. The big firms in the digital camera business, including Fuji and Kodak, are set to have their market share eaten up as Korean vendors, such as LG, chase their own piece of the action.

Optical technology also had its fair share of attention. While the debate has raged on over whether people should buy CD-rewritable units or concentrate on the introduction of writable DVD drives, Pioneer and a number of other Far Eastern players took time out of the argument to show actual products. The acronym now stands for digital versatile disk, and although they are read-only devices this year, the standards committees are likely to have ironed out their differences by next year?s Cebit.

CD-R devices, in fact, were shown by many more exhibitors this year, ranging from Acer, through Mitsumi to Yamaha. Ricoh claimed it was first to market but whoever wins the battle, it?s certain that CD-Rom is holding its own. Over 40 exhibitors, many of them big names, demonstrated products.

The arrival of thin film plasma screens caused a lot of excitement. The technology has the advantage of being far lighter and thinner than current TFT offerings. NEC has traditionally led this field, but Mitsubishi, Sharp, Sony, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Philips and Pioneer all showed variations of the technology.

Other notebook manufacturers showed 13.3in TFT displays. This market is pushed strongly by Toshiba and Sharp, but the form factor of an A4 notebook, while convenient to read, is hard to carry round. The vendors considered that they had mastered the yields on such screens, but it is certain that notebooks using the technology will sell at a premium.

Down in Hall 8, there were announcements from the backroom firms of the industry; the support chip and motherboard makers. Trident showed its Cyber 9397, a device that powers MMX-enabled 64-bit LCD flat panel systems. It also demonstrated its 3D Image 985 semiconductor, a graphics accelerator for the advanced graphics port on Klamath motherboards. Cirrus Logic also demonstrated its range of semiconductors that support 3D audio and graphics.

And there had to be some space for futurism. At Comdex/Fall 1995, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner talked about a device that fitted into a shoe so that, when two people shook hands, data was transferred between their bodies to be downloaded into a computer. The technology, personal area network (Pan), was demonstrated in prototype on IBM?s stand, running at speeds of about 2,400 baud.

But one of the problems with Pan is that a special conductive shoe and floor surface are required and users must be isolated from any other currents. The technology has some way to go before personal infirmation can be exchanged, never mind business cards.