Market Fears Rival New Products at Computer Show
Last month’s stock market crash, like some uninvited guest at a party, has thrown a damper on the huge Comdex personal computer trade show that opened here Monday.
Industry officials who had planned to celebrate their best year since the boom of the early 1980s were instead forced to confront what Lotus Development Chairman and Chief Executive Jim P. Manzi said in his keynote address was “our greatest fear: Does the stock market crash mean there will be a recession next year?”
“No one will claim that the industry can ride through a serious economic storm unscathed,” added Sheldon G. Adelson, chairman of the Interface Group, the show’s organizer. This fall’s Comdex show has drawn more than 85,000 participants from around the world and has left Las Vegas hotels bursting at the seams.
Despite the ominous portents from Wall Street, most of those interviewed said the personal computer industry is at the beginning of a new-product cycle and should continue to benefit from the dramatically enhanced machines introduced this year by IBM, Apple Computer, Compaq and others.
“The new machines deserve a new generation of software,” said William H. Gates III, chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, the largest microcomputer software publisher. “Our biggest challenge right now is to manufacture all the new software packages we are offering.”
Microsoft recently took aim at the industry-standard Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program with an IBM PC version of its best-selling Apple MacIntosh spreadsheet, Excel. A spreadsheet program allows users to prepare sophisticated budgets and other economic models. Another popular new Microsoft program, Windows 386, allows computers built around Intel’s top of the line 80386 microprocessor to perform several tasks simultaneously.
“Clearly, nothing bad has happened to our order pattern--yet,” said Luther Nussbaum, president of Ashton-Tate, which like Lotus and Microsoft is a publisher of software.
“October was very strong, and that’s the word from our retailers as well,” Nussbaum added. But, he continued, “if we indeed have a recession, it will affect the microcomputer industry.” While the industry, then doubling sales every year, was spared the effect of the 1981-82 recession, “at our current growth rate of 30% a recession would have an impact.”
Separately, dozens of companies exhibited or introduced enhancement boards and new software for IBM’s new Personal System/2 line. And IBM itself was slated to announce today that it is speeding up delivery of its new operating system software, OS/2, by as much as three months. The computer industry giant was expected to tell dealers that the first version of OS/2, which it developed jointly with Microsoft, would be shipped before the end of the year.
Tandon Computer introduced an innovative product called the Personal Data Pac. The device is a durable and portable hard disk drive that can be slipped out of one computer and into another.
But perhaps the most excitement of the opening day of the show was generated by Lotus’s new Agenda, an informational management tool that incorporates artificial intelligence to automate and cross-index textual and other data. Certainly, Agenda’s parentage is impressive; among its creators is Mitch Kapor, the Lotus founder who wrote 1-2-3.
