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From This Week's TechWatch
Reliving the past
By Jon Peddie
This issue has some
historical views in it that seem worthy of pondering, and hopefully we’re not
pandering.
We looked at CeBIT’s
history and wonder how it will evolve in the coming years, always with the
reminder of what happened to Comdex and other mega-shows. The consensus of the
smart people—that would be we analysts and writers, of course—is that the age
of the mega-show is over. It’s a dinosaur that has outlived its usefulness and
become a relic of the past that is too tired to know it’s dead and fall over.
CeBIT will not suffer
Comdex’s dramatic fate. For one thing CeBIT hasn’t been sold to investors with
hyped-up sales forecasts in an Internet bubble environment, as was Comdex. But
it does have other characteristics similar to Comdex, like its expense. Both
mega-shows also suffer from having organizers who seem to think they are doing
you a favor rather than seeing you as the customer and someone they should try
to be nice to. Both shows are located in somewhat difficult places to get to
and have limited housing facilities, and the weather is always unpredictable
for both locales, even with global warming.
All that suggests CeBIT
will decline. We wouldn’t be surprised to see it decline in size to probably
half of what it is today and devolve into a mostly German show with a European
slant. We expect that most of the Americans, Taiwanese, and Koreans will
gradually abandon the show over the next two to three years.
We also marked the
passing of John Warner Backus, the father of Fortran, in this issue. Fortran
was for many of us older folks the first serious language we learned. Basic
was, well, pretty basic, its most complex function being table support and
GoTo. And in those days, real programmers coded to registers, known as assembly
language, which was translated by bi-pedal biological carbon-based compilers.
We looked at the history
of Sigma Designs and took our hats off to the founder and his teams for their
stick-toitiveness and unwavering vision, which as the stock chart indicates
gave a 1,000-to-1 return over the past five years.
Another kind of
historical look is what we do every quarter when we examine the chip, AIB, and
workstation shipments for the previous quarter. This quarter we found that the
last quarter, Q4’06, wasn’t as great as we all expected it to be. There were
some bright spots in the CAGR for laptops, causing some research firms to
predict the laptop to take over pretty soon. We’re a little skeptical of that,
but then our view is about graphics chips, not just PCs.
And finally we wondered
if the past will repeat itself in the console market. That we’ll see it play
out the same way looks pretty dubious at this point with the PS3 holding up a
weak third place and Nintendo sales exploding—just the exact opposite of what
happened in the last go-round. Sony is the best positioned company to make a
run at the physical-action games Nintendo is pioneering, although Xbox360’s
“Dance Dance Revolution” is certainly popular. But Sony has an
accelerometer-based controller, and if the company expands their titles
library, as we fully expect them to, then by the end of 2008 things could look
quite different.
It’s a funny thing to
think about the past. You know the old saying about having to repeat it. We’ve
seen some of that over the years we’ve been chronicling the industry, on the
part of the in-rush of newbies anxious to invent something and make their mark
on the landscape. The other old saying is they didn’t know they couldn’t do
that (because they didn’t read the history books) and so they just went and did
it. So study the past, but don’t let it interfere with your dream—make your own
past.
