Show report: Spring Comdex, day two

Bill Gates opened the second day of Spring Comdex with a staged "Q & A"session where he explained that the future was all Windows NT and that theletters NC stand for "Not Compatible: not with PCs, not with each other."Java was another target for Gates, who suggested it was not something to"get religious over."

Not that I was there, of course. I was in bed.

After a late start, I headed to the show with Joel and Howard and met upwith Larry McJunkin, also of Wugnet. Larry was helping out in the CompuServe booth this week and we all noted that Comdex show crowds hadimproved dramatically. At the Microsoft demos, crowds gathered four deepbehind the provided seating and speakers started placing people on thefloor in front of, and behind, the seats. A normal Comdex after all.

The first order of business was a preview of Memphis, provided by programmanager Bernard Wong. He demoed Memphis builds 4.10.1434 and 1511 to a packed house, although the 1511 build crashed almost immediately. Hecorrectly explained that Memphis was still in pre-beta, and that the firstbeta was expected "in July." New features shown by Wong include USBsupport (with hot docking and daisy chain capabilities), DVD support (witha new file format called "UDF": there was no explanation of the acronym),and "enhanced" TV. Between Wong's demo and a separate demo by Microsoft'sDavid Ursino, I was able to piece together the following details aboutMemphis (and NT 5.0) features:

Wong mentioned that Memphis should be shipping by the end of the year,while NT 5.0 would be ready for primetime in early 1998. The Windows NT 5.0beta should begin in a "August-September" timeframe, although some selectdevelopers are said to already have a pre-beta.

In addition to the Memphis previews, Microsoft was running half-hourdemonstrations of numerous products, including Site Server, MSN, ZeroAdministration for Windows, Visual Studio 97, Visual Basic, Visual J++,Visual InterDev, Office 97 Intranet Starter Kit, IE 4, and Front Page 97.I hung around for several of these today and started nodding off immediately.

One interesting note for Internet Explorer 4.0: Microsoft's banners andliterature subtitle the product as "The Web PC." This seems like aninteresting attempt to distance IE 4 from mere browsers and explain awaythe incredible amount of features and complexity this release promises.

An excellent, but ultimately improbable rumor: Microsoft will abandon MSN,their Internet access service. According to the LA Times, Microsoft willtry to sell off the service later this year, based on a poorly quoted MSNprogram manager. The rumor was denied by Microsoft, who said they "probably" wouldn't shut down the service.

Before I knew it, I had wasted a good part of the day in the Microsoftbooth, so I headed out to see some more of the show. One correction, bythe way: MetaTools is now called "MetaCreations." They make Kai'sPower Goo (not "Tools"), now at version 2.0, and a new product called "Kai's Power Soap." They recently purchased Fractal Design as well, makers of the excellent Painter.

Product of the show has to go to AnySoft's Any97: it's a componentmanagement system, which basically means you can copy and paste from almostany source format into almost any other destination format. This is veryuseful for legacy programs, since most of today's applications work welltogether, but it will even let you select a range of text from a Web site,past it into WordPad, and have it retain the formatting. Very cool. Onedemo copied a text table in a DOS window and pasted it correctly into anExcel spreadsheet which then automatically created a chart. Email and Websupport is excellent as well. Basically, it's harder to explain Any97 than it is to show it off: check out http://www.anysoft.com for details.

They started turning the lights out in the convention center before we gotout of there, but Larry, Joel, Howard, and I eventually headed out sometimearound 6:00 p.m., about an hour after the show officially closed. We headedto the Silicon Northwest party, which is basically a way to get a bunch ofsoftware companies from the Pacific Northwest together with the press. Isaw a couple of interesting programs, most notably V Communications' excellent System Commander. I cannot recommend this program enough: thisand PowerQuest's Partition Magic are an unbeatable combination. I alsoate the biggest oyster I've ever seen. It was that type of event.

We skipped out on an invite-only "Digital Media Showcase" party hosted by MetaCreations, because it was too loud and packed with too many industrypress types, hanging out to scarf the free food. We had done enoughstanding for one day, so the four of us headed to Ruth's Cris steak houseto relax. Larry had left his pager in a bathroom and lost it (an endlesssource of jokes for the rest of the day) and we found at least six roadsnamed "Peachtree" in Atlanta, including places where two of them actuallyintersected (the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree). Everything here is named Peachtree, actually. This is clearly a trick to fool outsiders andwe responded appropriately by getting lost every five minutes.