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Reality Bytes:
These flops of Comdex past prove the future ain't what it used to be
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

By Andrew Kiraly

(Commentary:  This article, appearing in the “alternative” Las vegas Mercury, takes a decidedly jaundiced view of the overhype that usually surrounds the introduction of many new technologies. The  article was written to coincide with the annual Comdex trade convention in Las Vegas, the site where companies introduce new technologies and gizmos. The Mercury interviewed me because I’ve been delivering lectures and doing some radio interviews on the subject of the factors that help and hinder the successful implementation of new inventions. Although the article critiques the hype surrounding many new technolgies, it concludes with a balanced assessment of the breakthroughs that will become reality soon, such as  bionics, biometrics, and handheld computers. MGZ)

Here comes the future again.

For its 23rd consecutive year, Comdex beams into town this weekend, that decidedly unsexy geek-con featuring techies in their laminated dog-tags, gladhanding PR soldiers, squeaking booth babes and, of course, all the things you never knew you couldn't do without. This year's hot items? Microsoft is pushing its new Tablet PC--a sort of laptop-lite that can double as a digital doodle pad. Desktop PC stalwart Dell will dive into a new market when it unveils two new handhelds. And WiFi--that is, wireless Internet--will be the mantra on many a pitchman's lips. Gee, the future's so bright, we gotta wear cybernetic contact-lens shades.

Dude, you're gettin' a reality check.

Comdex may promise better living through technology, but its real record is as flimsy as the convention's free mousepads. Indeed, for every new toy that takes flight at Comdex, there are several that drop from the nest. For every Palm Pilot that splashes onto the scene, there's a WebTV that founders, for every iMac, there's an Apple Newton.

"Where do you want to go today?" Microsoft's ads ask. It's a deceiving question.

Much of the tech at Comdex--tamped tight with multimillion-dollar marketing campaigns--is an attempt to tell us where to go. But if consumers have the last word, then the following products and concepts are what happens when the world just says no--or when hype exceeds results.

Welcome to the can't-misses-that-did, Comdex's one-hit wonders,

Tomorrowland's rejects. Welcome to the future that never was.
E-books: a short,
short story

Reading is one of the nation's most popular pastimes. E-reading, however, clearly is not.

The big publishing houses leapt into the e-publishing fray in 2000, hoping to cash in on a dormant e-book market that--just you wait!--was ready to explode any day now. Going more on faith than market research, Random House launched e-book imprint AtRandom in summer 2000, lining up the works of its top-drawer authors to lure would-be e-readers. A year later, AOL/Time Warner thundered into the game as well with iPublish.com.

The e-reading renaissance wouldn't last through the year: In November 2001, Random House pulled the plug on its electronic imprint, citing lack of consumer interest. A month later, AOL/Time Warner tossed iPublish.com aside like a cheap paperback. According to a report in Publishers Weekly, Laurence Kirshbaum, chairman of Time Warner Trade Publishing, said, "The market for e-books has simply not developed the way we hoped, and we can't jeopardize our thriving print business by carrying a money-losing operation indefinitely into the future.

The economics of sustaining this kind of publishing on a broad scale are simply not there yet."

Why didn't e-books fly off the cyber-shelves? A creaky adage comes to mind: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Even e-book flacks admitted that, gee, regular books are cheaper to produce and cheaper for the public to buy. And who wants to curl up beneath the afghan with a cup of hot cocoa and a good e-book?

Hal Berghel, director of UNLV's School of Computer Science, says the flop of e-books is indicative of classic corporate top-down decision-making, a case of what he calls having "analog executives in a digital world" who insistently back "mistakes carried through to perfection."


"Technological blunders don't just happen," he says. "They are championed by people long on opinion but short on skills. When those people ascend to the executive ranks, impending disaster awaits."

Voice recognition: Can
you hear me NOW?!


Sometimes, it's a case of shuttling the product to the shelves before it's ready.
Touted as the cure for typing, the latest round of voice-recognition software splashed onto the marketplace with promises of hands-free writing and 21st century-style dictation, with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM's Via Voice leading the fray. And it's going to be a long, messy fray before this technology catches on, say critics.

"Voice recognition is a flop that I really wish wasn't a flop," says Robin Miller, an editor and reporter for Linux.com and Slashdot.org, and author of The Online Rules for Successful Companies. "I messed with both Dragon and IBM's Via Voice, and neither of them works well. The computer can talk to you just fine, but
the computer doesn't listen to you very well."

The problem? The programs aren't geared toward transcribing casual human speech; both programs, critics say, require a schoolmarm's attention to grammar and enunciation. And a noisy background is a no-no; otherwise, that memo you're dictating from your home office just might come out filled with the sounds of screaming toddlers. Typing class, anyone?

DVD: Better seen
than heard

Ever heard of DVD audio? Of course not. It never caught on, unless, like Professor Michael Zey of Montclair State University in New Jersey, you're a Mannheim Steamroller fan. See, it's one of the few bands that has released music--slyly packaged with its DVD--on the little-known format that brings the same separation and clarity that DVD video brought to the home-rental market.

"Everyone is accepting DVD as a video format," says Zey, head of futurist org
The Expansionary Institute. "But for some reason manufacturers are hard-put to get the public to welcome DVD audio, even though it offers full-channel sound with separation in the back speakers. For some reason, consumers seem to need high-fidelity sound with their movies, but are satisfied with less when listening to rock groups. Unless they do something gimmicky with DVD audio, it's going to continue to be rejected."

Adds Zey: "Most technicians and scientists believe if they built it, they will come.

That's not necessarily true."
E-commerce: Your
shopping cart has 0 items

For instance, what if they built, oh, say, a massive website selling pet care accessories and nobody came? Indeed, while the famous Pets.com spokespuppet is doing time somewhere as an oven mitt, e-commerce invokes as many snickers as the phrase "startup dot-com."

"Pets.com blew through $75 million and went broke because they ignored the first rule of business, and that's that your business is not a website," says Miller.

The list of sinking e-commerce sites is growing so rapidly that fans of the cultural phenom have started sites such as fuckedcompany.com to track the downward spirals. Seems as though if it's not eBay, its e-gay.

Or is it? Miller says while e-commerce has been a bust for the biggies, the lure of the web has proven lucrative for smaller businesses and bigger companies that take to cyberspace in measured doses. He holds up MexGrocer.com--a four-generation, family-owned Mexican food wholesaler based in San Diego--as a sterling example of the proper approach to e-commerce: slow and steady.

"Pets.com spent more money on advertising in a year than the Hernandez family spent in three generations. The Hernandez family made the Internet part of their business, not the whole business," says Miller, who says other companies such as Ikea, Land's End and L.L. Bean also have the right idea. "It's been a sexier story to write about gazillionaire.com going broke than about some rock band cleverly making money by selling its CDs online or a family business selling its maple syrup. But it's the little guys who are becoming equalizers in the online retail game."
Artificial intelligence:
Dude, where's my
protocol droid?

Speaking of commerce, how come robots aren't doing our shopping for us?
Vacuuming the living room? And where are the protocol droids serving blue cocktails? Artificial intelligence has been one of the most speculated-about, anticipated and overhyped developments of the 20th century--and now the 21st.

Other than occasionally clever bots in first-person shooters and a chess-playing robo-maniac named Deep Fritz, artificial intelligence has some serious cramming to do before graduation. A.I. researcher Jordan Pollack, associate professor of computer science and complex systems at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says it has to do with researchers coming to grips with a new approach to simulating intelligence. For years, he says, researchers have wasted time sweating the details, but the new approach involves grasping fundamentals.
"It took 300-400 years from people considering how to make flying machines until the Wright brothers came along," Pollack says. "But it wasn't about things like motors, it was about understanding the principles. And we do not, despite 50 years of work, have a good understanding of the principles of how the brain or mind works. So while we'll have a little bit of intelligence shown by, say, a home's thermostat, the scale of intelligence we think of being imbued in the human form is far beyond the kind of programs we could write today."

Pollack's aim is creating programs that learn and evolve, like humans. "An example might be a backgammon program that can play itself and get better,"

Pollack says. It's an approach governed by simplicity, and bound by real-world limitations. "In programming terms, biological systems might comprise billion-line programs, while what we could write directly is limited to a million. We might not be able to engineer such biological complex software directly, but there's a chance we could create a simpler program that would evolve it."

So don't put that C3PO on layaway just yet.

DigiScents: Smells
like failure

Another frenzied entry into the dot-com craze, DigiScents launched its iSmell peripheral in 1999. A plug-in piece of hardware that contained a palette of 128 different scented oils, the thing would create a smell--or a stink--when triggered by smell-enabled websites. Obsession.com would smell like Obsession!

Virtualflorist.com would smell like flowers! Flamingdogturd.com would...never mind. Despite a $20 million bankroll and 70 employees, the iSmell scent box never caught on as anything more than a novelty. The programming logistics proved troublesome as well.
"Okay, just a thought here, but would a company like, say, Gucci, trust this little box to accurately reproduce their fragrance?" asks Philip Kaplan, who runs fuckedcompany.com and authored the book F'D Companies: Spectacular Dot-Com Flameouts. "And if so, wouldn't people then just use the fucking smell from the box rather than actually buying the perfume?"
However, if iSmell had succeeded, Kaplan admits he'd probably put it to use: "I'd make Fuckedcompany.com smell like peas," he says. The Oakland-based company shut its doors in April 2001.

Biometrics and nanotech: Almost...there...not

A veritable byword in the new post-Sept. 11 securityspeak, biometrics entails identifying people through voiceprints, face recognition, palmprints and iris-scans. While the FBI is said to have such techs in its anti-terror arsenal, some observers say such stuff is still, far and away, the preserve of science fiction.

"It's being overhyped a lot, and not nearly as effective as claimed," says Pollack.

"It's like the Patriot missile in the Gulf War. It was supposed to take Scuds out of the sky and got great press at the time, but afterwards, some hard-nosed analysis showed it wasn't nearly as good."

And what about nanotech? You know, microscopic robots that could, say, be injected into your bloodstream and do all kinda nifty repair work on your bod?

While hyped as the next big thing for years, nanotech is way behind schedule.
"It could be 20 years before anything useful comes along on that front," says Pollack, who counts the Polaroid Instamatic as the first piece of nanotechnology--it was a camera and processing lab built into a compact box. "If you read some of the gizmo mags, they really do expect it to happen, but I just don't see it. The kind of mezzo-scale mechanical integration required for that sort of thing hasn't been achieved yet." Don't cancel that physician's appointment just yet, because Dr. Nano is definitely not in yet.

Home smart home

It's a standard set gimmick of sci-fi flicks: The protagonist is walking through his home that's perfectly programmed for comfort and common sense. Lights flick on as he enters the kitchen; perky fusion jazz seeps through hidden speakers on cue, and the robo wet-bar serves up a perfect gin and tonic. Problem is, we like doing those things for ourselves, says Dr. Zey, which is why the "smart home" idea never made it to our front doors.

"I wonder if there was some unconscious resistance from people. I think people feared losing control on some level," Zey says. "Do I really want the lights to go off and on when I go into the room? Sometimes I want the lights on in a room I'm not in. It's little things like that that show the smart home won't be as smart as I am if my needs change."

What does the future
hold?

None of this is to completely pooh-pooh the tech parade. Even the most jaded

Comdex vet--who has seen more than his share of future-schlock hype--has his  eye on some Next Big Thing. The gurus interviewed for this article couldn't help but offer a few predictions. What do they see on the horizon?

¥ Bionics. "The whole area of life enhancement technology is going to truly change us," says Zey. "From genetic engineering to tissue regeneration to bionic implants, this area is doing to extend life, improve our health and it will impact everything else in society."

¥ Eyepieces replacing computer screens. "When we get a VGA [video graphics array] quality eyepiece, that'll start to change to the shape of a computer," says Pollack. "We'll see entire Windows computers the size of a phone you wear on your belt."

¥ The death of the desktop--and laptop--computer. "Japan's computer culture shifted dramatically when handhelds became popular, and the same will be
happening in the U.S.," says Zey. "It's not hard to imagine it becoming a necessity. You won't see people running to their desktop computers or trying to find a connection for their laptop."

But the most useful item of all for living in the 21st century? A big old-fashioned grain of salt.

"The problem with Comdex is the same problem with fast food," says Miller. "All that stuff looks so great in the commercials. But when you get it, it's not like that at all."

www.lasvegasmercury.com/2002/MERC-Nov-14-Thu-2002/