This morning's keynote speech -- HP boss Carly Fiorina at 9.00am -- was packed out. If Comdex is down this year, it is impossible to tell from the crowds. I congratulated myself for getting to the event at about 8.30, because there is a limit to how many thousand people you can fit into a corridor -- and that's what the Convention Center concourse is, even though it is a fat one. Unfortunately I neglected to consider that the problem would be considerably worse on the way out. Oh yes, the answer is that you can fit several thousand people in a corridor, but they don't go very far very fast....
As for Carly, she showed us her new TV adverts, which are really no better than her old TV adverts. Her first and last message was to Think Positive: "Progress is not made by the cynics and doubters. Progress is made by those who believe that everything is possible," she said. The second message was that HP is a big important world-beating company that can challenge IBM, not just one that sells dinky colour printers to home users. She did get in what some referees might consider a low blow: HP is open, she said, "not a company pretending to be open in order to get you to buy more of its proprietary technology."
Incidentally, AOL has come through again, with this posting being made by good old-fashioned dial-up. I just spent most of an hour in a black hole, trying to sort out a non-working Wi-Fi system. It seems the Comdex press room network has about 400 IP addresses but there are about 650 people trying to use them. Having failed to get a working wireless connection, I eventually tracked down a working Ethernet router ... only to find it wouldn't talk to my ThinkPad. Phone lines are like gold dust. It was actually a lot easier to communicate from Comdex in pre-Internet times. The systems were much more primitive, of course, but there weren't so many people trying to use them.
