From: Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Short Comdex Review
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 15:55:23 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)


A couple short personal notes about CBM's show booth at 
COMDEX/Fall '92 in Vegas...

CBM's booth was about 30' x 30', quite small compared to the "major
players" in the personal computer industry (by comparison, Apple's
booth was the size of a tract house, if not two). CBM was not in
the main show hall (the LV Convention Center) but rather over at
the Multimedia Showcase two-showroom-setup at Bally's on the Strip.
I was rather pleased to see a huge CBM Amiga banner hanging from
one of the balconies in the lobby of the Convention Center, though,
which pointed people to the location of their booth at Bally's.

Sue West posted a press release detailing the vendors who 
showed their stuff at the Commodore booth so I won't re-hash any
of that here. 

But I did spend a good 10 hours walking thru the various halls
at the convention center and at Ballys and Sands hotel convention
centers, and made a lot of mental notes (and used a lot of mental
floss) about who was pushing what and how they were pushing it,
and how they were promoting their products.  In comparing Commodore's
booth to many others (hell, there were over two thousand separate
booths at this mother of all trade shows), CBM came across as
extremely staid and conservative.  They had a dozen Amigas on
display (1200, 3000, 4000, and CDTV), or maybe less. Three times
in one afternoon I left the booth and came back still seeing 
what what must've been DMI's section of the booth with signs
in front of the computers that said "do not touch", and no one there
manning them, showing off any product.  I watched one of the 1200s
running an AmigaVision demo but by Friday afternoon, a couple hours
before show closing, the machine kept crashing. I rebooted it 3 or 4
times myself, launched the flow again, and it crashed again. 

I don't know if the machine just went bad from 5 days of continuous
overuse or abuse or what, but someone should've replaced it, not
ignored it. 

A travelling companion of mine overheard a Commodore rep tell a
booth attendee, who wanted to see some digitized pictures of
people on the 1200, that "the 1200 can't digitize because it
doesn't have any slots."  I asked my friend to tell me who had
said this and to repeat it again because I couldn't believe a CBM
rep would actually say this to someone, but my friend did not remember
who the rep was except that he was wearing one of the CBM red
company ID badges on his jacket next to his COMDEX badge. My friend
said he took the disappointed attendee aside, after hearing what the
rep had told him, and explained to him that that info was entirely
wrong, and that there are products such as DCTV and PP&S FrameGrabber
and others which can digitize fromvarious video input sources and
do NOT require any slots since they're connected to the computer
externally.

CBM had a 3x4 foot poster on one of the booth walls, detailing the
winner of the "4000 reasons" contest (again see one of Sue West's
recent c.s.a.announce postings for the winning entries). This
was good to see but what struck me were all the other booths that
had cards to fill out to win stuff there at the show. They counted
in the hundreds of booths. Many other booths had a gimmick whereby
they had people walking the show floor handing out cash and prizes
to people who were wearing that company's buttons which were
being handed out at their booth. I saw many people wearing many
buttons on their chests. I scanned every surface of CBM's booth
and did not find any buttons, bumperstickers, or any other kind
of promotional goodies that were being handed out to show-goers. 
Again, COMDEX is a 5-day show and I didn't arrive till Wedsnesday...
so maybe they had stuff there and had given it all out the first
two days. (yeah right). They did have literature on the Amiga models
but that was it. 

I could go on with this but I'll just depress myself, and probably
the readers here too.  I realize that huge house-sized COMDEX booths
have price tags on the order of half a million bucks or more, and
far be it for me to tell CBM how to spend their marketing money
when it comes to trade shows (as much as I'd like to :-)

When I compare the computers themselves, the Amiga comes out on top,
by far, vis-a-vis its direct competition. I'll agree fully with
the other poster's comments: I too spent some time checking out
Atari's booth and all the Falcon/030 machines there and they looked
like and felt like toys to me. I wouldn't have one. However,
Atari had software to talk to Photo CD and they were showing it.
So was Apple with their Macs. So were a number of other vendors.
If CBM is linked up with Kodak and has any Photo CD software 
cooking on Amigas now, it was not in evidence at their booth. 
One Falcon was stitching Atari logos on caps which the reps handed out.
I've own and used and written about Amigas since the fall of 1985
and have no plans to stop, or defect to another platform. I love
the machines and what I can do with mine.  However, given their
showing at COMDEX, in that literal ocean of hardware and software
on display there, CBM's booth seemed very sedate and way too
understated for my tastes. Their WOCA/Pasadena show booth was far
more exciting/interesting and much larger too. 

So C'mon, Commodore, loosen your ties a bit and have some fun 
with the Amigas when you rent space to show them at industry
trade shows like COMDEX. We, the faithfull, know full-well what
these computers can do.  It's up to you to convince the great
unwashed masses to give the Amiga a serious look before they 
whip out their wallets and take home something else that's 
far inferior.

Harv
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy