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Electronic News, Nov 19, 2001 by Steven Fyffe

Las Vegas taxi drivers were lamenting the lack of business at the Comdex trade show last week, according to several attendees. It is usually one of the busiest times for a cabbie.

"The cab drivers tell me it looks like about 60 percent of normal," said John Paulsen, a spokesman for disk drive maker Seagate Technology Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif. Their on-the-street observations were remarkably close to official estimates. Conference organizers said the attendance numbers were down to about 125,000 this year, compared to around 200,000 last year.

"There are fewer people than I have ever seen in Vegas," said Bentley Nelson, director of strategic marketing at disk drive manufacturer Maxtor Corp. in Milpitas, Calif.

Nelson is a regular at many of the technology conferences held in Las Vegas, including the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

The usually chaotic Vegas strip, with its aggressive hawkers pushing advertisements into the hands of passersby, was uncharacteristically quiet near the upscale Bellagio Hotel where he was staying, Nelson said.

Overseas visitors were keeping their distance, jittery in the wake of the recent hijackings and terrorist attacks on the United States, Paulsen said.

"What I've heard on the local news is there has been almost a complete cease in travel from Japan," he said. "That's a pretty large group of people that would normally come."

But the Comdex faithful braved the journey, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Some of the gadgets and announcements that made it into the headlines include Intel Corp. showing off its next-generation PC motherboard, code-named Hannacroix. The motherboard supports two competing bus standards: USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a (known as Fire Wire on the Macintosh platform and i.Link on Sony products). It uses Bluetooth chips from Silicon Wave Inc. and 802.11b chips from Intersil Corp. The motherboard on display also featured chips from Cypress Semiconductor, Marvell, Cirrus Logic and NEC.

National Semiconductor Corp. displayed a multifunctional device the company calls Origami. Running on National's trademark Geode processor, Origami can be folded to become a digital camera, a phone, MP3 player and Internet terminal.

IBM Corp. demonstrated its Enterprise X Architecture servers to select customers, according to media reports. The servers use Intel Xeon processors and IBM chipsets, but IBM reportedly is planning to move to Intel's advanced 64-bit McKinley processor. The Enterprise X Architecture allows 16 processors to be strung together.

In his keynote speech, Microsoft's Gates touted the virtues of the Tablet PC. The Tablet PC can interpret the strokes of a pen on its screen and convert them into graphics and text. Many prototypes were on display at the show, including designs from Intel, Compaq, NEC and Toshiba. Microsoft has developed a version of its XP operating system especially for Tablet PCs, Gates said. Gates also put the Xbox game console through its paces while on stage.